Nordic Film Talks: Eskil Vogt

Norway’s Eskil Vogt is celebrating an exciting season with Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi), which he co-wrote with director Joachim Trier, winning 6 EFAs and now being nominated for a record-breaking 9 Academy Awards and 8 BAFTAs.

It all started with two simple ideas – they wanted Trier’s next film to reunite them with actress Renate Reinsve (whom they collaborated with on her 2021 Cannes Best Actress-winning role in The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske), and they wanted to explore an idea about sisters. “We wanted to do something about the sister dynamic,” Vogt recalls in the latest episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast. “And also explore the concept that you could grow up in the same family but have very different childhoods. The sisters were where we began, and then the father entered, and the house.”

They started brainstorming a story about three sisters, but that of course became two – Reinsve plays anxious actress Nora, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays grounded young mother Agnes, who have differing responses facing the return of their often-absent father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a film director who for decades focused on his work. Gustav hopes to cast Nora in a personal new film, but when she says no, he recruits American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). The rich characters have earned all four actors Oscar nominations.

Both Trier and Vogt have sisters, and as with The Worst Person in the World or previous films like Thelma (2017) also prove, they are not scared to write complex female characters. Vogt says, “We never ask ourselves: Are we going to write this as a man or a woman? We don’t want to gender it, we want to think about complex, interesting people.”

Vogt and Trier became friends before they were collaborators - they met decades ago, as teenagers working on the technical crew of live TV shows in Norway. They were young film lovers who liked to swap VHS tapes of US indie films, even before they separately went to film school (Trier in the UK and Vogt in France). Fast forward three decades, and they have now co-written all six of Trier’s features (starting with Reprise 20 years ago). Separate to their work together, Vogt has also directed two features, 2014’s Sundance hit Blind (Blind), and The Innocents (De uskyldige), which premiered at Cannes 2021.

Vogt says it’s probably no accident that he and Trier decided to make Skarsgård’s character a film director. He explains: “All directors and writers are obsessive. When we are working on something, it's very easy to neglect other parts of our lives. So we are of coursre afraid of becoming a little bit like Gustav Borg, Stellan's character. At the same time, we're also very aware that our generation of filmmakers and artists is very different from Gustav Borg's generation. That was the generation of the male genius who wasn't expected to deal with trivial matters like taking care of their kids or even being faithful.”

While busy on the awards trail for Sentimental Value, Vogt is already scripting his next film as a director – details aren’t announced yet, and he says his directorial work “has to have a shot at being something original”. He hopes his next film will be a mix of genres that could offer the “possibility to mix Bergman and Hitchcock in one film”.

In the full podcast interview, Vogt also talks about similarities between Oslo, August 31st (Oslo, 31. august) and Sentimental Value; the emotional audience responses to the film, surprisingly from young people on TikTok; and what he learned directing kids, and cats, in The Innocents.

Listen to the podcast here:

All Nordic Film Talks episodes are available on NFTVF’s website on the Industry Insights section (CLICK HERE), and are distributed through major podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon, Castbox, Deezer, Podcast Addict, Podchaser and JioSaavn.