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MillimeterFade to Black: Joachim Trier, Director
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
What do Henry James, the Ramones, Alain Resnais, and Diner have in common? Ask Joachim Trier regarding his first feature Reprise — which Miramax Films picked up for distribution, with Hollywood producer Scott Rudin signing on as one of the executive producers to help champion the film, after after the movie won Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay Amandas (Norway's Oscar). Trier says he believes both high and low culture can make an easy and potent mix, and they do in his comedy/drama about two young novelists struggling to make their way as adults.
“It's kind of scrapbook film,” Trier says. “I wanted a lot of different things — a ‘dirty formalism.’ I wanted many kinds of influences. … [My DP Jakob Ihre and I] love Tarkovsky, but we also remember having a discussion back when some Michael Bay action movie came out. We were trying to defend his way of doing something spatial in one action scene, and everyone hated us for that. I think form and content in film can't easily be separated if you're doing it properly, [and] we are using different, various ways of telling the story in one movie.”
Indeed, his film is poignant, gripping, and funny. The story plays in both the recent past and projected ideas of what the character's futures might be. There is an enthralling immediacy to the film, and it is handled with a technical skill and finesse that makes one take notice.
“Cinema has always been technical,” Trier says, in partial reaction to the Dogma 95 directors of Scandinavia. “That's not saying that you can't concentrate on humans at the same time. I want to do mise-en-scène very specifically. I also want to be with the actors on set. I hate it that there are two kinds of directors — actors' directors and camera directors. No.”
For Trier to achieve this delicate balance, he and Ihre work out the scenes together with a DV camera.
“Instead of doing storyboards, we do floorplans, so the production will know we are shooting in this direction at this time,” Trier says. “We might be able to use some natural light for the first half of the day, then emulate that for the latter half. So on the same document as the floor plan, we would have little still samples from some of the DV we shot.”
Reprise was shot on Kodak Vision2 Expression 500T with an Arricam LT. All of it was shot on location in Paris and Oslo, Norway. Black-and-white footage, showing both the distant past and the potential futures of the protagonists, was shot on a hand-wound N16mm Bolex. Some digital effects were done in Autodesk Flame for several scenes, one of them evolving out of the authors' book-jacket photos. Trier even included some Super 8 home movies from one of the actors' childhoods.
Trier did his first digital intermediate for Reprise and graded in Autodesk Lustre 2K on a big screen, which impressed him. In a few scenes he had trouble with moray, so they graded in 4K. It was expensive and a little unsettling.
“I'm a bit worried that we were doing it at a time when the technology hadn't reached its potential yet,” he says. “I was kind of sad to see the stuff that we did in 4K look better than those scenes done in 2K — that there was a difference, which of course made me feel that you want perfection all the way.”
But it is evident that Trier and his cast and crew are very pleased with the finished film.
“Cinema that's sensual and visual can also have intellectual aspirations,” Trier says. “There is something about trying to play with many languages or not abide to certain genre specifications, as in art house vs. mainstream. I'm interested in people that are exploring those borders between things.”
