Two years after her death in a car crash, the husband and sons of famed photographer Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) are still trying to cope with their loss. Gene (Gabriel Byrne) struggles as a single parent, but is taking his first steps towards a new relationship with one of his son’s teachers (Amy Ryan). Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg), the elder son, has just had a baby of his own and finds the transition from child to parent more than a little daunting. The younger son, Conrad (Devin Druid), is a typical teenager, wearing his alienation as a badge of honor and resisting his father’s every attempt to connect. On the occasion of a major retrospective of Isabelle’s work, Jonah returns home to help his father organize her effects. Once again under the same roof, all three men are flooded with memories, and secrets are unearthed—most notably the truth behind the mysterious circumstances of Isabelle’s death. Shifting between past and present, and juxtaposing external reality with glimpses into the interior lives of each of its four major characters, Louder Than Bombs, directed by acclaimed Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier and co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, is a stunningly intimate portrait of parents and children and the many things that tear them apart and bring them together. I sat down with Joachim Trier in Los Angeles to talk about this moving film.
Danny Miller: I so loved the nonlinear structure of this movie. When you’re making a film like that, do you work all that out in the script or is it more something that happens in the editing room?
Joachim Trier: Both! We did write that approach into the script, it was always our intention, but we knew we had to be open to finding our final version in the editing process.
It makes the movie seem more like the way memories really work, how they tend to cascade into each other. I was very impressed with how you pulled that off.
Thank you, that’s exactly what we were going for. Here’s an example that comes to mind. My co-writer, Eskil Vogt, and I came up with this idea when we were working on the script of someone in a classroom listening to someone reading and then that turns into the voice of the character telling us his thoughts. We had the little brother infatuated with this girl at school, she’s reading aloud in class and what she’s reading makes him start thinking of his mother’s death. He doesn’t know exactly how she died, just that it was a car crash. Then, looped into that is a memory of his childhood when he was playing “hide and seek.” He suddenly realizes that his mother must have seen him because he was in a really dumb hiding place so that makes him realize something very important about her. Then we’re back in the classroom. In choosing those images, we see his passion for the young girl along with his longing for his mother — almost an Oedipal connection without having to ever say that. When you try to write that kind of stuff in a script you get a lot of people saying, “Um, can you really make that work?” and you just nod your head and say, “Oh yeah, I know exactly how I’m going to do it” even though you’re scared shitless because you have no idea! But you have to trust your vision and hope that all your preparations snap into place. You need to plan well, of course, but it’s still a huge leap of faith. That’s what I love most about filmmaking.
And it makes watching the film all the more rewarding rather than something we can predict every step of the way.
This is a fragmented story of family disconnectedness but it’s also about the shared love that they end up finding with each other.
I love how the film looks at memory and how there’s not really one “truth” to anything which also ties into Isabelle’s work as an acclaimed photojournalist.
Yes, exactly!
I didn’t clock how much time Isabelle Huppert is actualy in the film but she looms so large in a way that really resonated for me. My own mother died many years ago and yet is still such a presence in our daily lives.
Absolutely. This is the aftermath of sorrow and grief and yet constantly reevaluatng the importance of those relationships is a part of those memories.
Which is all the richer when you have someone at the top of her game like Isabelle Huppert. I mean, is there a better actress on the face of the earth?
Seriously? I don’t think so! If you asked me when I was a kid watching French movies at the Cinématheque who I’d like to work with one day more than anyone else it would have been Isabelle Huppert. She’s just remarkable. And such a risk-taker, she never does the obvious thing, she never engages in what I call “comfort-zone acting” even though that’s the kind of acting that often wins Oscars. Isabelle isn’t interested in giving a “Great Performance,” she’s always more subtle, more unexpected, more multi-layered. Just incredible. Sometimes after a take we’d look at each other and she’d say, “I know that was good but I have another idea.” So of course I’d say, “Sure, let’s do another one!” If you give her the space, she’ll keep digging.
I love that powerful moment when she’s looking straight into the camera — it almost seemed like an homage to that moment in The Lacemaker when she turns to the camera which she made almost 40 years ago.
That was the one shot in the film that I did with the camera on y shoulder! I was working with a wonderful DP, Jakob Ihre, such a generous and sweet guy who comes from the Sven Nyqvist school of having these incredible abilities with light. When we got to that shot, he said, “Here, Joachim, you need to hold the camera for this!” It was such a thrill. And just to show you how technical and emotional Isabelle can be at the same time, I put the camera on my shoulder, we talk through the scene, I roll, she goes through all these emotions from laughter to crying, it’s just fantastic and it lasts for a really long time. I’m thinking, “Oh my God, this is the greatest moment of my life as a director,” and I finally say, “Cut.” I tell her, “My God, that was so remarkable!” and she looks at me and says, “Yeah, I didn’t blink once!” That’s Isabelle.
I love that you never tell us explicitly what happened with her character. It makes the whole film into a kind of Rorschach test — even the question of whether Isabelle’s character committed suicide or not. I know we see a flashback of what happened that night, but I still wasn’t sure it was a suicide. And I think that’s because of my own stuff that I brought with me into the theater. Are you getting a lot of different reactions from people who’ve seen the film?
Yes, and I love that you called it a Rorschach test because this is exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted the film to be almost like a prism that you could look through form different perspectives. People end up caring about different characters and having their own interpretations of the events. I just sit there and think, “Yes, that was the point of the film!” Some people will probably complain that it’s confusing but I meet a lot of people who feel very deeply about it and have their own take on what’s going on.
Now I’m questioning why I didn’t think it was suicide, I may need to bring that into a therapist’s office. I think it’s more about my relationship to my own family members and how I look at things that have happened.
(Laughs.) I think dealing with our families is an ongoing therapeutic process. Most people who see the film think that Isabelle killed herself but there is definitely doubt at play. I love that kind of ambiguity.
And when someone close to us dies, it also seems to affect our memories of them.
Absolutely. The aftermath of grief is also about ultimately accepting the humanity of our the people we’ve lost, isn’t it? When we lose someone we tend to automatically idealize them and that’s a part of what makes it hard to let go. While they’re alive we’re far more apt to accept their complexity but once they die, it takes work. To go even further, and I’m feeling slightly pretentious here but let’s go for it, we all know that in the end we die alone. The actual realization of that is a tough premise to deal with. So we need to detach from our loved ones in a way and become our own individuals. Still, at the moment of losing someone, a lot of that stuff comes to play in very painful ways.
And it can take years to work that through, even after their deaths.
Yes! One of the things I love the most about making movies is finding the space for such contemplation. To deal with these issues of loneliness in a cinema is very valuable to me because it gives us time to think while also being around other people. Where else are we ever even in a space where people turn off their fucking phones (hopefully!) and just sit there together and breathe and think and look at images and give themselves space to contemplate what they’re seeing.
It’s true. I have to say that for all the jarring and emotional moments in the film, the one that shocked me the most was when the younger brother spits in Amy Ryan’s face.
I’ve been to screenings where the whole audience audibly gasps at that!
I had this understanding of his character in my head but that moment made me see him in a completely different way. Devin Druid was so good in that part.
Isn’t he fantastic? Such a discovery. That particular scene was very hard on him because he’s so polite and caring as a person so it was tough for him to do that to Amy. And I really can’t praise Amy Ryan enough, she is incredible, and such a damn pro. Every single take she does is so interesting. Our editor wasn’t familiar with her work and he kept saying, “Who is this woman playing the teacher? She’s a genius!” I’d love to work with her again.
Gabriel Byrne was also wonderful as the dad. I loved that his character was a former actor and that you were able to incorporate that horrible clip of him from 20 years ago!
That was from a Disney movie called Hello Again! Shelley Long was very generous and gave us permission to use the clip which made me so happy. It was Gabriel’s first part in an American movie, playing the handsome doctor. He hadn’t seen that clip in many years and was horrified. He said, “That’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”