In cinemas this Friday is the ‘dramatic delight’ Louder Than Bombs, a new independent film that stars Jesse Eisenberg, Gabriel Byrne and French actress Isabelle Huppert.
An upcoming exhibition celebrating photographer Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) three years after her untimely death brings her eldest son Jonah (Eisenberg) back to the family house – forcing him to spend more time with his father Gene (Byrne) and withdrawn younger brother Conrad (Devin Druid, in a breakthrough performance) than he has in years. With the three of them under the same roof, Gene tries desperately to connect with his two sons, but they struggle to reconcile their feelings about the woman they remember so differently.
Louder Than Bombs is directed by celebrated filmmaker Joachim Trier, who we caught up with earlier this week to talk about his superb new film.
Joachim Trier
Congratulations on the film, I really liked it. I only saw it the other day, but it was at Cannes last year. It must seem like a long process for you, getting this out there.
Joachim Trier: This is the end. I’m doing a new film not so I have got to get on with that. I think that the U.K. is going to be my last stop with this one actually, which is great because it’s kind of full circle. I was at the National Film School last night. I used to study there under great teachers like Stephen Frears, and I remember people like Mike Leigh and Robert Altman came and visited; it was a remarkable time in my life, and I learned so much. I also made several short films in English, and then I went back to Norway and did two Norwegian features, so when people think that working in English is a radical new experience, actually I’ve done it before with short films. This is where I started working.
Let’s talk about Louder Than Bombs. You co-wrote it, as with most of your films, so what are the origins of the story? A question you’ve been asked a million times, but…
No, no, no. It’s a hard one to answer actually. With this one, Eskil [Vogt] and I sat down in a room, and we started to have all of these ideas about family and relationships, and we ended up with making a story of three men, of different generations, and how they were trying to connect with women in their lives when they had lost the mother in the family. We didn’t want to make an immediate grief story where she dies and they start crying… it’s three years after the fact – the aftermath, when a family asks itself ‘who are we, and why do we remember everything so differently’. It’s set-up a little bit as a mystery. How does that start? Millions of stupid little notes on a table and then trying to make a story out of it. I wish I could say that it was this one scene, but I knew we wanted to do a type of film with a Volvo driving over Autumn leaves in Upstate New York. It was the kind of movie that I grew up loving when I was a kid; a great character drama in America like early Woody Allen movies, Ordinary People by Robert Redford, or even The Godfather, the family dynamic story. I think that was something that we wanted to try.
Was the decision to make it in a non-linear form something that you made early on?
Yes, absolutely. We knew that we wanted to do something in a free-er form. The reason was that part of the concept of the film is to be very close to characters, very intimate almost, but to see the discrepancy between their perspectives. As an example, the fatherland the young brother of 15. We see some of the same scenes and we realise it’s the same day but we see it from different perspectives. We could only do that playfulness if we had that formal setup, so that was an early decision.
There’s a lot of restraint in how the drama unfolds, but there’s always this underlying threat that it’s going to explode at any minute. Was that always the case?
I like this kind of tension building. I find in real life – sure there are circumstances where there is a lot of yelling and screaming – but most of the time I find that the real drama is sort of like an undercurrent. That’s the real excitement, that the audiences knows about everything but they see this build and build, but the characters are kind of trying to be kind to one another, and they’re a little in denial and they’re avoiding the conflict, and eventually things happen – obviously, it’s a drama, but no… I’m interested in that.
We’ve said that this is your first English language feature film – was it always the cast that yes, this is the one that I’m going to make in the U.S.
It just happened. It happened because Reprise was such a hit in America. It was distributed by Miramax, and all these producers wanted to work with me, so yes, it gave me an opportunity.
We need to talk about the cast. How did they all get on board?
It was the screenplay,y, but also our previous work. I still shoot with the same DOP, and have the same editor on all my films. I mean, they’re cinephiles. Isabelle Huppert was very supporting of Oslo, August 31st. She reached out actually and wanted to do something. Gabriel [Byrne] and Jesse [Eisenberg] were both aware of my previous work, but they’re both film fans. They care about movies, which is kinda fun. When I reached out to them and asked if they were interested in reading my script, they got on board fairly quickly. Again, this is one of the reasons for working in America – to work with great national actors, and not necessarily only the most famous, but the ones that I thought were the best actors, which was how we set-up the whole film. I’m a final cut director. I have control over the cast and the cutting, and all of my producers are very cool and understanding about that process and support me, but the point was that we need to cast a family that’s believable as a family – also how they look and behave, but at the same time they need to be great actors, and match each other. You needed a strong chain. It then became that we have these strong actors, but what do we do with the kid in the family.
Yes, we have the character of Conrad. A very impressive actor named Devin Druid plays he role. How did you find him? It’s a very pivotal character in the film.
Oh yeah. It was the biggest challenge. We now had this stellar cast, and now it was ‘how do we get someone who can match it with this fifteen-year-old kid. I met hundreds of kids. I had a wonderful casting department in New York, and we worked for months and months, and then Devin Druid came in and it was pretty obvious early on that he was the one. He’s perfect, I think, and its also interesting because not only is he a great actor, but he kind of links Gabriel and Jesse (in terms of looks).
What does Jesse bring to the table. He’s obviously now on this stratospheric rise in Hollywood who has this wonderful balance of playing these really fantastic, smaller roles, and then being able to go and do these huge roles, like Lex Luthor.
He’s a very smart guy. He also writes plays and for the New Yorker, and all kinds of things. He’s an amazingly generous and funny guy. In his private life I find him to be very smart and witty. We were suddenly scared that we were going to lose him, because we shot parallel with Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, and he made Warner Brothers sign him off for five weeks, because there kind of owned him for a year, and very generously, Warners said ‘okay we support the project’, and gave him five weeks to be with us. So he went from Lex Luthor to Jonah, our character, and back to Lex Luthor again [laughs]. He’s a great actor that he can do both at the same time.
We have the character that Isabelle [Huppert] plays, who is obviously a war photographer. Did you get into a lot of research when it came to her role, and what photographs were used in the film because there’s some quite powerful imagery there as well?
Yeah, I did a lot of research. I met several conflict photographers and also read quite a lot. I remember reading Don MuCullin’s autobiography. He’s one of the greatest of all time, and he was very, very wise and virtuous in his approach to the profession. Very, very impressive. So, lots of inspiration there. The photos are from real photographers. There were quite a few, but I can mention Alexandre Bouillon, a very important French, female photographer, and we were allowed to use her work, and Paulo Pellegrin- several really great ones. It was a long process with researching and finding something that would feel coherent as the mother’s photos.
With the film, it is all about family. You had these three men. Did you give them a lot of time to prepare in terms of rehearsal?
Yes, we had some rehearsal time which was good to acclimatize and give them the chance to get to know one another, and also for them to get to know me and find a shared language. I don’t perfect the scenes. We do alternate scenes, improvisational stuff and we hang-out and get to know each other, and I find that very good to share ideas. We then film all of that, and then I do a final re-draft of the script afterwards with some refinements.
With final cut, it must give you immense freedom on set.
Yeah, within the time constraints. I found a New York team that’s incredible that were so fast… American teams are amazing and you shoot twelve-hour days which is ridiculously long but everyone’s stamina is so impressive. It was a tough shoot, and we moved it around everywhere in New York. We had so many locations. I’m used to shooting in London or Norway and you find the best location in that town, and you go from one place to another. In New York State, it’s so vast it was like a candy store of amazing places.
You’ve already spoken that you’re working on a new film. Can you tell us anything about that one, or is it top-secret?
Unfortunately its a little bit of a secret, but I hope we can talk about it at Cannes. The producers are in the middle of financing. It’s going to be a Norwegian language film, and then I hope to do an English one after that. The first one we’re writing now is a local story about a girl in her twenties, and its more suspenseful than anything I’ve done up until now, so we’ll see.
Louder Than Bombs is released in U.K. cinemas on Friday 22nd April, 2016. You can read our review here.
