In Joachim Trier’s third feature, Louder Than Bombs (co-written, like his other two films, with Eskil Vogt), we weave between the mindsets and memories of three men — a father, Gene (Gabriel Byrne), and his two sons, Jonah and Conrad (Jesse Eisenberg and Devin Druid, respectively) — as they recall their memories of their wife and mother, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). The family is forced to face their past relationship with Isabelle, who was a world-renowned war photographer, as they prepare for a retrospective of her work and an accompanying New York Times profile that will inevitably reveal more than Gene and his eldest son Jonah would like, and more than Conrad ever realized about his own mother.
We met with Joachim Trier to talk about his first American feature (the previous from the Norwegian director being Reprise and Oslo, August 31st), capturing subtlety in film, and his love of disco.
You’re also a DJ, right?
I have a club called Noble Dancer, which is like ’80s soul, hip-hop, post-disco. Like Paradise Garage-ish, we’re playing a lot of gigs recently. I mean, I’m a film director and this is my embarrassing crisis of turning 40 or something but I DJ’ed when I was a kid and suddenly picked it back up because a lot of that ’80s stuff I’m into is so happening. Oslo turned out to become the disco capital of the world. And my friend, who is a DJ, said, “You know, you have a lot of good vinyl from that era, come and play.” And before I knew it I had a room full of kids dancing to Chaka Khan and Afrika Bambaataa.
I’d like to go to more discos.
You must, you must!
For Louder Than Bombs, what was the seed of the idea? There are so many different relationships going on and I’m wondering where it all started for you.
I don’t know. This is the thing: It was like an explosion of fragments and chaos and me and my co-writer having all theses ideas of characters and moments and seeing, oh, this could be a family story. Then suddenly, oh wow, how to use form and fragmentation to talk about a fragmented family. We worked like action filmmakers. We do set pieces so we have a diary of the little brother, day in the life of when the father follows his son and we understand later that we see it from two perspectives, like a thriller. We think like set pieces and then we create the story. So I guess that’s why our films are a little bit strange. Going back to Afrika Bambaataa, we rip it apart and put it together in a hopefully unexpected way. We write way, way, way more than what you see on screen and we take the moments that could be combined and make it out of that.
So there’s a lot left that we don’t know about it.
Yeah, and my first film Reprise was ridiculous in that way. It’s about two friends and their gang of friends around them. I could have easily made two seasons of a TV show out of that. But I wanted to thematically focus it. That’s why I like feature films as well, just to round it off within two hours. To get people to go home and feel like that’s the end. Then hopefully that chaos and all the characters will resonate with people.
Is it easy for you to cut out ideas and material? Or do you ever find yourself precious with ideas?
It comes and goes in waves. I have waves when I need to be precious about things and waves where I get cold and saw off my arm because I need to move forward. And that’s the art, it’s to go in-between those phases in the right way. Abstraction really means to remove, I think. Doesn’t it? Sorry, that didn’t lead anywhere.
No, it led everywhere. I wanted to ask about Devin Druid’s character, Conrad, because I’ve been thinking about that character since I saw the film. I feel like I know him but I can’t figure out how. Where does he come from for you?
He comes from many places. Conrad was so exciting to write because we had to venture into the mind of a 15-year-old kid in present-day America. A gamer that’s much more than he seems. He’s not that introvert kid after all. It is perhaps his social persona, but his interior life — which we venture into in dreams, memories, diaries — is much, much richer. I really love him. He’s someone who has a great mind, he just hasn’t grown into becoming that brave person who knows how to take it into the world. And aren’t we all a bit like that? There’s something inside us that we need to grow into to allow ourselves to be. And that’s Conrad. He’s the one that everyone worries about but maybe he has the smartest answers after all. But I think also Devin Druid, I need to credit him, he came in with a lot of great ideas. Devin knows this character somehow very well and he was 15 when he did the part. Thanks to him as well, we like that character.
How did the actors surprise you in what they brought to their characters?
Jesse brought this almost sinister but humoristic… He’s like, “This big brother, he’s not always nice, is he?” And he brought in this sort of bad guy yet well-intended big brother. What touches me about that story is the two brothers, because they have such an age difference and actually, we observed them getting to know each other. That’s a big part of the film. Isabelle Huppert is remarkably intelligent and a great actress so she would take scenes and suggest other versions of the same words. And Gabriel is kind of a father character in his own right. He’s very conscious of the other actors, very warm. And my companion in creating the film in the sense that he’s a very generous person. And he knew in a way that I wanted to portray his character as heroic even though he gets pushed around by everyone, he’s actually a hero. He stands firm. He keeps approaching his sons even though they push him away. He does what I think parents will have to do, which is stay put. That’s the job. That’s the heroic story of a father that stays put. It’s not a superhero movie like the other movie Jesse’s promoting at the moment. But a hero of sorts.
Is there a character you feel most connected to?
No, I think they’re all me and my co-writer and none of them are us at the same time. The feeling of responsibility of the father, the need for ambition and doing your own thing of the mother, the being the big brother who feels you’ve been given too much responsibility because the parents are a little bit dysfunctional, which all parents, at the end of the day, are. Or the little brother that needs to be allowed to be who he is to grow and all these people worry about him. All these elements are things that are human and they deal with, we all go through several of these processes so this was more, than anything I’ve done, about accepting the stages of life. And these three men that we follow primarily represent different stages of manhood or of aging.
What’s interesting too about those three are their varied perceptions and I like that we get to see everyone’s viewpoint and how they recall their relationship with Isabelle Huppert’s character.
I don’t know if you have siblings.
Yeah.
When you talk about your parents don’t you feel you somehow disagree a bit? Who has the objective truth in a family? No one. And that is the premise of the story. The varied perspective and also how it changes through time and the happiness and pain of a child needing to separate from their parents. And in our culture, at least, we need to. We need to become individuals. And it’s a bumpy ride for everyone and I think that’s the central theme of the film. We try to make an honest statement of how painful it is to break away and become who you need to be.
And do you think that narrative changes at all by this being an American family?
Yes and no. I think the themes are universal and the characters are characters I could imagine in Norway, maybe not the mother and her international prominence as a famous war photographer. I think that’s quite perfect for New York to be honest. But I wanted to make is specific and I wanted to make it a kind of movie that I grew up watching a lot of and don’t really exist anymore, which is the John Hughes, Woody Allen, Ordinary People, that kind of autumn leaves kind of family. They drive a Volvo and don’t have the greatest of times with each other kind of movie. I love those films, and they don’t happen in America. Nobody wants to pay for them because they’re not commercial enough. And I’m like, fuck it, we managed to get this film made on a pretty decent budget with, in my view, the greatest actors in the world. So there is a chance to do these films. And who knows how it will be in the market place. That’s not my job. I do what I do and we’ll see how it turns out.
Are you not concerned with that, the result of it? Just as long as it happened?
Artistically that’s my job. The result, everything matters. But at the end of the day I won’t chase the market as an artist. I grew up listening to Bad Brains and Black Flag or watching filmmakers that people don’t even know today but inspire me. Or old stuff that wasn’t happening but now is very popular. I like underground culture and I think the world is so quick in its communication so things spread in an interesting way right now. And you have the double tendency, one is that everything becomes homogenized because everyone can discover it immediately. But you also have the ripple effect of small events and smaller movies. You can actually do something very small and local and it will percolate into culture and you don’t know what will happen. That’s something we should all think about, we shouldn’t chase the market. Do your thing and see what happens. I’m bored about the standardized expectation of dramaturgy at the moment in movies. People are making millions selling books about how you should make a story. That’s not how hip-hop was invented, that’s not how punks started feeling raw and original when it came about. I’m sorry, that’s not how culture evolves.
Throughout the film you focus on subtle moments that really stick with the audience. Like when the girl’s urine slides under Conrad’s shoe. I wouldn’t think to focus on a small detail like that, but that moment was quite poignant. So do you just have a catalog of these ideas, or how do you come up with these little moments?
It’s trying to be open to strange ideas that occur. When you’re working on a project you maybe spend a couple years thinking and writing and if something appears, it could be right after a while. Because you’re priming your brain to create this thing and the themes are coming in and out of focus for you. So if an idea comes up it might occur for a reason. And in the story there’s this theme of what’s idealized. Like the mother, or the love story of the little brother, how he imagines a girl to be. And also the mundanity of life and how these things interplay. So I think the scene you’re referring to is very much about realizing the relationship between the idealized and the mundanity of life and how you don’t quite know how these things interplay with each other. And hopefully that can create an emotional moment in cinema. There is a sense of eroticism and beauty to it, yet it’s terribly mundane. Hopefully both. It’s one of my favorite moments in the film actually.
What other moments stick with you?
I’m more and more curious what other people think. I see certain things reappearing and that people are revealing themselves to me in what they are talking about. Because it’s a film almost like a prism, you can look through generational perspectives. It’s very interesting for me how some people will come in, like journalists, and talk about Conrad and the need to express themselves in the world, and other journalists might come in and talk about the difficulty of being a mother and having a tough job. Someone might come in and say how to be a dad in the modern world with kids that are so into social media and don’t know how to connect with them. All these things are very present in the film but people will take from it different things. Then I think, Louder Than Bombs, the machine is working .Because this is what I wanted to create, not reducible to one single plot or character but that people were allowed to sit in cinema and think about family life for a while. I don’t want them to engage in one way. There’s a broken mirror on the poster for a reason, it’s fragmented. You should be allowed to see different things in it.
Do you analyze people based on who they want to talk about or relate to?
No, but I’m curious about people and perspectives and behaviors and that’s why I make films about people too. But no, it’s not a judgmental analysis. It’s more a curiosity.
