The Painfully Funny Truth of the Unread Script: ‘Sentimental Value’ Writers Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt on Finding Story in Frustration

In Sentimental Value, director/co-writer Joachim Trier and longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt create an intimate, character-driven drama that treats family as both a grand performance and a place to hide. 

If that sounds contradictory, that’s the point. The story focuses on two sisters, actress Nora (Renate Reinsve), and historian Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who must deal with their distant, film-director father, Gustav (Stellen Skargård), when he shows up after the death of their mother. At first it seems like Gustav is trying to fulfil his fatherly duties, but soon it becomes clear he’s chasing a career comeback with a raw, autobiographical script he’s written for Nora. The premise is thick with dysfunctional family dynamics, painful memories and generational trauma, but luckily, still has room for humor. 

Trier and Vogt began developing the script by meeting in person every morning. “We write together. Most days, we meet at nine in the morning. Let’s say it takes a year,” Trier says. The Norwegian filmmakers say they weren’t chasing a high-concept hook but a layered “human knot” – something messy but real. “Now that we both have kids, and we have parents that are still alive, maybe this is a moment to explore all the stuff we don’t know how to talk about in families,” Trier says. 

That desire to express all the things we keep hidden shaped the film’s structure. The idea for the sisters came first, with the writers fascinated by how siblings raised under the same roof can be total opposites. “You can grow up with the same parents and have completely different childhoods,” Vogt says. Initially in the script, they had the father as absent, or maybe appearing late in the story. But once they added him into the script, Vogt says, “He took over the writing room. We had to rein him in!” Because Gustav was such a strong character, they had to reimagine how his presence would affect the sisters’ conflict. Gustav makes for a great antagonist and becomes one of the main characters, played to perfection by Skarsgård. 

Vogt and Trier are almost giddy about their love of paradox. Nora, a stage actress without a husband or kids, looks down on her sister’s “safe” family life yet envies it, weaponizing her own standards against herself. “She’s both above and below her sister,” Vogt says. 

Trier extends the paradox to performance itself: Nora’s crippling stage fright isn’t just a funny quirk, it’s one of the themes. “Approach and avoidance. Maybe Nora feels that she has to go on stage to be herself, yet that is also the most anxious place to step in. We are ridiculous at times, we want it and we hate it. Those double emotions bring some humor into it. We wanted to have a film with a sense of levity. Yes, it's about inherited grief, and how history implicates itself in a family's woundedness, and that matters tremendously, but it doesn't mean it can't have lightness and humor as well.”

In other words, let your main characters want and hate the same thing. Embrace contradiction as the engine of behavior, and the humor will emerge.

At first, Trier and Vogt were worried that making the father character a filmmaker felt too insider-ish, too meta.  But when it led to the film’s poignant ending, they realized it was the best choice. 

“We justified making this film towards ourselves, because it gave us a key to unlocking a deeper understanding of the character dynamic in a family,” says Trier. The takeaway here is to always follow your instincts to see how they play out.  

Enter Rachel (Fanning), the Hollywood actress cast in the daughter role Nora refuses to play in her father’s film. What could have been an easy satire (the stereotype of a ditsy Hollywood star) becomes an inciting incident. “We knew it would be too tempting to just make fun of the Rachel character so she became this kind of catalyst of the family dynamics,” Vogt says. Rachel is talented and wants to do real work but her presence needles Nora, producing one of the film’s richest mirrored moments. 

“Rachel says, ‘I don’t feel that the roles I’m being offered have anything to do with me. I want to do something real,” says Trier. “A little bit later, Nora says, ‘I am trying to avoid myself by being a character in fiction.’” Both are true, exposing the yin and yang of the characters and adding complexity to the story.

One of the pitfalls of writing screenplays about dysfunctional families is that they can easily slide into talky, boring, kitchen sink dramas. 

To keep the story cinematic, Trier has this suggestion: “Keep them moving. Physically. Create spatial and physical movements to not make a theater piece.” He says one of the best things about a movie is, “You don’t have to emote through words. You can be silent, you can react, you can run.” Locations, blocking, and activities help characters reveal themselves through action.  

One of Sentimental Value’s funniest recurring beats is painfully familiar to writers: the unread script. “It’s a movie about how hard it is to get someone to read your script,” Vogt laughs. Gustav constantly badgers Nora to read his script, but she refuses. The four-inch-thick script looms on the kitchen table and becomes an antagonist and a joke. It’s also proof that objects on screen can carry theme, tension, and comedy all at once. 

We asked the writers if they recommend using their own lives as subject matter. “We pull from everywhere,” Vogt says. “If there’s something in our own lives, or people we know, we’ll use it to color the situation, or make it more truthful.” But they avoid making any resemblance too obvious. “We don’t like to put a person we know into a script. We want it to be more like a hall of mirrors. No one is me, or I’m everyone.” The takeaway here is to interpret without imitating. Filter specific traits through creativity so the result feels intimate and universal.

Sentimental Value opens in limited release Nov. 7 and wide release Thanksgiving weekend.