Making The Worst Person in the World, an Oscar-nominated ‘unromantic comedy’

The Worst Person in the World, is, we’re told, a Norwegian expression, a hyperbolic response to a small mistake. As in: “I burnt the toast; I’m the worst person in the world”.

It’s also the title of the new film from writer-director Joachim Trier, and the project that has propelled the filmmaker behind the much-admired dark fantasy Thelma and the Gabriel Byrne headliner Louder Than Bombs, to a larger audience and several award ceremonies.

To date, the film has won the Best Actress award at Cannes for star Renate Reinsveat; Trier and his regular co-author Eskil Vogt are currently shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and for Best International Feature Film.

“That was a surprise,” says Trier. “Especially with the writing nomination. I was sitting next to my co-writer and old friend Eskil, when suddenly our names jumped on the screen. We were like, wow, not expecting that. It’s wonderful.”

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The Worst Person in the World is the third instalment in the director’s Oslo trilogy, following on from 2006’s Reprise, in which two young writers and best friends, Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman Høiner), evaluate the ambitions against their talents, and Oslo, August 31st, in which a troubled young man (Danielsen Lie again) pushes friends away and contemplates suicide.

The Worst Person in the World is (mostly) lighter than either of these predecessors. A character study of the young, freewheeling Julie (Renate Reinsve) as she bounces between two men and various job statuses – Julie is first introduced a medical student, then a psychology major, then a photographer, then somebody’s girlfriend, then somebody else’s girlfriend. And so on.

The episodic structure, like the heroine, lunges between things, with such fragments as: “Chapter 3: Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo” and “Chapter 8: Julie’s Narcissistic Circus”. It was a challenge, admits the writer-director, to build a character study around a woman who is, well, something of a flibbertigibbet.

“We try to make films where the dramaturgical premise is interior character developments,” says Trier. “So that there is a classic structure at the end of the day. But it emerges slowly as someone grapples with thematics and moves to the next stage in life.

'I think it was Billy Wilder who said: Don't give the audience four; give the audience two plus two and let them come up with four. I think that's a good approach'

‘Fragments from a life’

“We wanted it to feel like beat by beat, entertaining or thought-provoking. The scenes from a life or fragments from the life of Julie, are told through these chapters, without it being more of a conventional, flowing, clear development, one thing builds to the other. I want the audience to engage in the interpretation of it and to feel there’s stuff left out that you have to fill in. I want to invite people to imagine. I think it was Billy Wilder who said: Don’t give the audience four; give the audience two plus two and let them come up with four. I think that’s a good approach to making movies.”

Co-writers Vogt and Trier have an interesting relationship with genre. Thelma (2017) follows a sheltered young woman to college for a coming-of-age tale that transforms into a spooky struggle with telekinetic powers. Louder Than Bombs (2015) is a starry family melodrama that comes to vie with the old movie Rashomon for competing perspectives.

“I mean, Reprise was kind of a buddy movie,” says Trier. “Oslo, August 31 was inspired by the modernist novel and ideas of solitude. With Louder Than Bombs, I wanted to make something like a psychological family drama like Ordinary People. With Thelma, I wanted to make a supernatural thriller. I keep trying to make genre films but every time I fail and they turn into drama.”

In this spirit, The Worst Person in the World has been variously described as dark romcom, an unromantic comedy, and a dramedy. It’s Trier’s version of a classic romcom, he explains, albeit with terminal illness, and scenes in which wooing involves shotgunning joints and peeing in front of one another. (“It’s not cheating,” reasons Julie, “if they are just peeing.”)

'I do love Notting Hill. And I do love the fact that even in these very light, romantic films, you can find some sort of existential pondering'

“I don’t believe in genres really,” says the director. “But I do believe in them as playful guardrails or support wheels along the way. And yes, we did look at The Philadelphia Story by George Cukor. And I do love Notting Hill. And I do love the fact that even in these very light, romantic films, you can find some sort of existential pondering. And so I’m not against calling our film a romcom if that’s how one defines those films. But I do admit that we go somewhere slightly darker with this one after a while. Maybe dark is the wrong word, but perhaps more melancholic.”

When The Worst Person in the World premiered in the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival last July, Trier was following in the footsteps of grandfather Erik Løchen, artistic director of Norsk Film from 1981 to 1983 and a filmmaker whose drama The Hunt was nominated for the Palme d’Or in 1959. His co-writer Vogt’s second feature as a director, The Innocents, premiered in the same line-up.

“My grandfather was in the Resistance during the second World War,” says the filmmaker. “And he was captured and barely survived. He was very traumatised. And he played jazz music, I think, to try to get it out of his mind and to live his life. And he started making movies around that notion, and reading experimental literature. And in 1959 they invited him to Cannes and said: Oh, this is New Wave. For him, it was a jazz movie. It was a great thing. And it mattered a lot to our family. And in a strange way, my grandfather helped make the support system that I’m now privileged enough to make movies through. So going to Cannes was a big deal for me.”

Skateboarding champion

Trier has, accordingly, been around the film industry his entire life. His mother was a documentarian and his father was a sound technician; both, he notes, were anomalies in Norway, where the film industry was comparatively tiny. As a teenager, Trier became a skateboarding champion who shot and produced his own daredevil skateboarding videos. He was still surprised when he found himself enrolled in Denmark’s European Film College and then London’s National Film and Television School.

'My mom primarily did documentaries, but I was also on set sometimes with her and it was just like seeing grown-ups play'

“It’s weird, because as a kid, you realise those kids who cannot shut up cannot be allowed on set,” recalls Trier. “So you learn this great respect for silence, especially around film, especially around my father, who was a sound recordist. My mom primarily did documentaries, but I was also on set sometimes with her and it was just like seeing grown-ups play.

“What’s even weirder is, when I was 18 I finally told my friends, you know what, I want to try and make a living as a film director. And I felt that it was like a coming out moment. And all my friends went, yeah, we knew that. Because I’d been filming all along, making weird super-eight movies. I guess I’m not as gifted as Julie. I didn’t have options. I had only one thing I could do.”

Trier cites the work of Robert Bresson, Alain Resnais, and Andrei Tarkovsky among his primary influences. Studying in London, however, proved equally impactful.

“The National Film and TV School was really, really important,” says Trier. “I was rebelling against it most of the time because I came from a formal background and I wanted to make films like Brian De Palma and Antonioni did. I wanted to have complete control and they wanted us to collaborate. I found that difficult. But we had such great teachers. Stephen Frears taught us and he’s brought so many great actors – like Daniel Day Lewis, and Uma Thurman and John Malkovich – to prominence. And he taught us that you can’t fake great casting. We had talks from Mike Leigh and from Robert Altman.”

He laughs: “And they must have all brainwashed me, because I forgot all about making formal and experimental films and became a humanist filmmaker who’s interested in observational drama and collaborating.”

The Worst Person in the World opens on March 25th.