Nordic Film Talks: Dag Johan Haugerud

Norwegian writer/director Dag Johan Haugerud says he likes a challenge - and he gave himself his biggest challenge yet by shooting three feature films in about 10 months to create the new trilogy Sex Dreams Love (Sex Drømmer Kjærlighet).

“I wanted to embark on a bigger project,” he says of the initial idea for the trilogy, which came to him after he had made the 2019 Venice-selected Beware of Children (Barn).

Now he returns to Venice with Love (Kjærlighet), the second film in the trilogy. It marks the first Norwegian film to compete for Venice’s Golden Lion in 38 years.

The trilogy does a deep dive into themes of sexuality, relationships, intimacy and queerness - challenging society’s norms about all of the above. “I thought that it would be good to give different perspectives of one or more related topics,” he says in the latest episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast series. “Because when you are making one film about one topic, it's never really finished. While you are working on it, you think there could be different perspectives, so that you could have different characters thinking differently and reflecting differently on the same topics. Three films are not enough to talk about sex. You should make many more films, because every person has quite individual takes on sexuality and feelings about it, so it never ends.”

Sex is about two heterosexual men who suddenly find their feelings about sexuality, gender and identity challenged in different ways. Love is about a woman in her 40s who wants to try just having casual sex instead of a monogamous relationship. Dreams (Drømmer) is about a teenage girl’s first explorations of her sexuality,

The queer aspect to each film was very important to the writer/director. “I think queerness is what connects them, really. I have been writing some novels as well, where I have always touched upon these themes or on queerness. I wanted to describe queerness in a different way than what I have been reading or watching in films myself… I wanted to depict queerness in a way that felt relatable for me, and that is not to focus on the usual conflicts concerning homophobia and coming out of the closet. I was trying more to describe queerness in a way that could be quite attractive to a broader audience, not just the queer audience,” Haugerud explains.

The trilogy is already off to a strong start to reach that audience - Sex premiered at Berlinale 2024 Panorama, and is now nominated for the Nordic Council Film Prize (an award Haugerud won previously in 2020 with Beware of Children). Dreams is also ready, but the team isn’t yet revealing where it will have its world premiere. M-Appeal handles sales of all three films, and has sold Sex to major territories, including North America, Germany, Benelux, Spain, Italy, France, the U.K. and Ireland, South Korea, and many more, and Love has closed deals with North America, France, Germany, Austria and Benelux even ahead of its Venice debut.

The trilogy’s producers are Yngve Sæther and Hege Hauff Hvattum at Motlys, and key backers are Viaplay, the Norwegian Film Institute, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Oslo Filmfond, and local distributor Arthaus (which released Sex in Norwegian cinemas in March).

For Love’s story, he was partially inspired by Olivia Laing’s book The Lonely City, about a straight woman who becomes intrigued by the gay cruising culture of New York City. In Love, Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) is a female doctor in her 40s who wants to try having more casual sex instead of a monogamous relationship - and is inspired by the liberated lifestyle of the younger gay male nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), who she works with.

Cruising of the older era, or more modern hookup dating apps, can be seen as “something dark, something maybe dangerous”, Haugerud says, but Laing’s book helped open his eyes to “something that is quite warm and tender and intimate. And it's not just about sex, it's also about conversation and being intimate with people outside of a relationship”.

He wrote the role of Marianne with actress Andrea Bræin Hovig in mind - after collaborating with her many times, including on the 2014 film I’m the One You Want (Det er meg du vil ha).

Haugerud likes to work in a way that brings the actors into the process - “I'm also very, very open for the actors' comments, because they are going to embody these characters. It makes very much sense for me to listen to them, and find out if something doesn't feel right in saying a line, or if maybe it should be expressed in different way.”

He says Hovig is the kind of actor who has to “really understand on a deeper level why the person is saying this stuff. She wouldn't say anything just because it's written in the script. She needs to really understand it and live it.”

The entire trilogy is set in different parts of Oslo (with one common location appearing in each film - Oslo’s City Hall). Love was a particular challenge, because it was set on one of Oslo’s peninsulas, and the commuter ferry became a very key location. “We had to shoot while the ferry was working,” the director explains. “They couldn’t wait for us to get our equipment on board, so we just had to run aboard with the equipment…and then we could only shoot for 19 minutes [before the ferry would dock again]. That was quite challenging,“ he says, but adds with a laugh, “but it's good to have a break every 20 minutes.”

Once he has ideas, he can write first drafts very quickly (sometimes in one day). “I feel very lucky when things are going as easily as these three screenplays,” he says.

The team shot the three films back to back - Love in summer 2022, Dreams in winter 2022, and Sex in early summer 2023. In hindsight he wishes he’d had a longer pre-production period for the second two shoots, but he and his crew certainly made it work. He says “a big point was to make three very different films that should look and feel very different”, and pays tribute to his DoP Cecilie Semec, who he says “has done a very good job in coming up with different ideas”.

He adds that Sex’s visual style is “formalistic in a way”, and Love “feels lighter in the way the camera is working - and looking for the musical moments as much as we could - and Dreams is a much more loose camera” and also has more close-ups, because it's from the perspective of one 16-year-old girl.

The director hopes that one day some cinemas will show all three films as a package. “I hope that they connect in a way that they can grow on each other.” Each film does stand completely alone as well.

Haugerud hopes the films might inspire people to talk about sexuality in a more open way. “We have to admit that it is natural. And I think when we do that, it becomes more easy to talk about it as well. And that's, of course, what I've been trying to do in these films.”

In the full podcast interview, the filmmaker shares much more about his wild experience of shooting three features in 10 months, including how he writes scripts with specific actors in mind; how his producers rose to the challenge of financing the three films; and how he finds writing first drafts of screenplays a kind of daydreaming.