‘Worst Person in the World’ Explained: What Inspired the Romantic Comedy
“The worst person in the world” was one of the best things to happen to actress Renate Reinsve and filmmaker Joachim Trier. “best lists of 2021”.
Finally opening for its full theatrical release this Friday, the film has also been shortlisted for the International Feature Film Oscar, representing Norway (nominations will be announced Tuesday morning).
The whirlwind of attention around Reinsve in particular has included his signing with CAA as a US agency, the international press and awards campaign, and public praise from many celebrity fans, including Nancy Meyers, Judd Apatow, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dakota Johnson, Colman Domingo and many more. others.
“Whirlwind, that’s a really good word for it,” said Reinsve, 34. “It has been absolutely overwhelming but so much fun. I worked in theater for so many years, and there you work vacations, you work nights, you work days. I haven’t traveled much. So now I can travel everywhere and meet so many cool people. I should have done this all my life, but thanks to Joachim, I am doing it now. I’m very glad that didn’t happen to me when I was 23 because now I can rely on myself and I know who I am and my values and everything. I can take it, but it’s still very overwhelming.
Reinsve and Trier sat together on the patio of a hotel in Beverly Hills during a recent promotional stopover in Los Angeles. For as much talk as the two have already had about the film, they enthusiastically exchange ideas while answering a reporter’s questions, as if they’re still discovering new things about their collaboration.
The fifth film directed by Trier and co-written with Eskil Vogt, “The Worst Person in the World” completes a trilogy exploring youth and growth, following Trier’s first film, “Reprise” in 2006 and the 2011 follow-up, “Oslo, August 31. (Both films starred Anders Danielsen Lie, who also co-stars in “Worst Person”.) Trier made his English language debut in 2015 with “Louder Than Bombs”, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Gabriel Byrne and Isabelle Huppert, followed by queer paranormal thriller “Thelma.”
Although ‘The Worst Person in the World’ found Trier in familiar territory exploring the lives of young people in Oslo, he was unsure how he would be received.
“We were so worried,” said Trier, 47. “To be honest with you, I felt this movie was going back to my roots, looping back to 15 years ago, just trying to be very free in how I made this movie. Free to have time with the cast to explore and free time with Eskil and I in the writing room to just have fun. Let’s do cutscenes, weird ideas, shoot 35, see what happens, play.
“So when we got to Cannes and we hadn’t shown it to more than five people at a time and you were in this big screening room of, what is it, 2,300 people, and they actually seem to be enjoying it and laughed and cried and gave us a standing ovation, I was really moved,” he said.
With a title inspired by a self-deprecating Norwegian saying, “The Worst Person in the World” is told in 12 chapters marking a journey of self-discovery for its protagonist, Julie. She leaves medical school, moves in with Aksel (Lie), a slightly older graphic novelist, and eventually joins Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), whom she meets when she is hosting a wedding party. All the while, she tries to figure out her professional life — she works in a bookstore and aspires to be a photographer — and manages relationships with her divorced mother and father.
The film’s fluid, high-energy style includes stunning sequences such as Julie imagining her relationship with Aksel on hiatus, and the entire town frozen in place with her, and a tumultuous moment in which she hallucinates wildly after eating psychedelic mushrooms with Evind.
As for why the film seems to strike a chord with audiences, Trier has a theory.
“I think it’s about the ambivalence,” Trier said. “I may be completely wrong, but we live in a time where we are being presented with a lot of pretty aggressive opinions. It’s a very difficult climate right now, in the media and social media, and [in] this movie, I’m really trying to be intimate, vulnerable, to talk about a character who’s incredibly ambivalent about things, not sure at all. And showing the humanity of that is, I think, a more gentle way of approaching something and giving space to the audience, rather than getting on my platform and ranting about my strong opinions.
“In a way, I went a little against the climate right now,” he said. “And I didn’t know if people would appreciate that, but it seemed like at least some people had embraced that side.”
“It feels like people really need it,” Reinsve added. “Someone who really digs deep into what it’s like to live now and to love now. It goes really deep into the nuances of what it’s like to be a human being today. And I have feel like people really appreciate the way you made this movie, and it gets so personal to people it’s hard to see the time you’re living in while you’re living in it, but I think Joachim and Eskil writing this movie really captured something.
“There’s something about Julie,” Trier said. “Without being too academic about this sense of transactionalism, Julie feels she has to prove her worth all the time or she has to choose the right thing that will give her the most value. She tries to find the right guy, the right work, the right identity, and she tries to transcend that; her purpose doesn’t have to be measured in a transactional way. And she goes through all of those iterations, trying to accommodate different tastes and who she might be.
“And I think that internal space of self-acceptance, we can all sometimes struggle trying to find that space,” Trier continued. “I think we owe it to Julie to take things seriously. The journey in this film is to explore this self-acceptance.
Reinsve had a line in “Oslo, August 31”, but the nature of the production meant she was on set for several days. She and Trier had stayed in touch, and she had auditioned for him for other projects but had never been quite right for a role. He and Vogt wrote the role of Julie with her in mind.
The day before the call from Trier to offer Reinsve the role, she had decided to quit acting, thinking she might instead go into carpentry, frustrated after years of working in the theatre. She had no idea what Trier had been working on and recalled the mix of emotions she felt when reading the script for the first time.
“I was so nervous,” she said. “As an actress because he wanted to write a character who could access both lightness and humor, but also tragedy and drama. And I’ve done both a lot… but what if I don’t log in to this role? What if it was like “It’s not me”. I can not do it.’ And I think before page seven, I texted you. The start of the film was as she sneaks into the wedding. And I was like, ‘OK, I love it.’ I immediately fell in love with her and started working very hard for a year. I’ve never worked so hard on a character.
When Trier and Vogt began writing, Trier was initially exploring relationships where he had been older than his partner, writing from Aksel’s perspective. This changed during the work on the script.
“I wanted to explore what I had learned in retrospect about this kind of relationship. And then, all of a sudden, I realized, “Well, he’s a much more interesting character,” Trier said.
The timeline of the film is open to interpretation, as the chapter breaks up into ellipses in the exact passage of time. Trier noted that the film is meant to cover roughly a five- to seven-year period, taking Julie from her late 20s to early 30s. For Reinsve, portraying this passage of time was just one of the challenges of the role.
“We talked about it early on that his body language and his way of thinking should be different over the years,” she said. “So I was doing a lot of work and analyzing it, so it was very clear to me. Because we’re not shooting it chronologically, no, so I had to be very sure that I was in the right body and in the right mindset for where she was… It’s very small nuanced differences, but for us it was very specific.”
For all that is upbeat and playful about the film, Trier also knows when to pause and settle down, allowing the gravity of a mere moment to take over, such as when Julie and Aksel have an intense and moving conversation then. they were sitting in a park on a sunny day.
“I think the greatest drama of my life has happened in very quiet conversations, to take time between people where the level of intimacy or understanding is very high and you access deeper moments like that “, Trier said. “I come from Scandinavia, Bergman, Dreyer, looking at a human face like that. There is a specific artistic possibility about the cinematic experience on the big screen. You cannot reproduce this in any other format.
Trier also borrowed a technique favored by American directors such as Apatow and Adam McKay, throwing in alternate lines and ideas while the cameras were still rolling, but doing so for dramatic scenes as well as comedic scenes. He mentioned the wedding crush sequence where Julie first meets Eivind and their flirtatious interactions are supposed to stop before they cheat on their partners. A scene where they challenge each other to do their ugliest face was cut, but an improvised moment not in the original script where they feel each other’s armpits happened.
“I think it’s because I do this,” Reinsve said. “I feel people.”
Please explain.
“You can tell if you’ll have chemistry with someone based on their smell. It’s a science thing,” she said. “But before you read it was a science thing, I just to do it. It’s fun, though, like, ‘How do you feel?’ “
“I think people intuitively, when they see the scene, they understand that it’s transgressive,” Trier said. “It also pushes the limits of what they can do. What charms me at least about feeling someone is that it’s very intimate without being explicitly sexual.
“And that’s not a rule, you haven’t broken anything,” Reinsve said. “If you’re in a relationship, you said, like, ‘You’re not allowed to kiss anyone,’ but you can’t say, like, ‘You’re not allowed to smell anymore.’ Now it’s going to be something after this movie.
Trier added, “We’re spoiling it with this movie.”