Quotes

I want to kidnap the drama back from HBO and put it on the big screen.

[on Louder Than Bombs (2015)] I love the film Kes (1969) by Ken Loach. My favourite moment in that film - the one where I always cry - is when the kid, who doesn't know how to express himself, is suddenly asked by his teacher to talk for the first time and tell them how he takes care of his bird - he knows the boy is with this bird all day. And the kid speaks for the first time and talks freely about who he is. That's not exactly what we're doing, but I wanted Conrad's diary to be a revelation of the discrepancy between his social inability and his inner life, which is so rich. [2015]

I went to the National Film and Television School in London, we called it "National Social Realist Film and TV School". Stephen Frears was a teacher there and Mike Leigh, people that I now admire tremendously for their skills in drama, but at the time I was really into Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Brian De Palma. I wanted montage and the break of the image and the form to be really at the essence of what I did, and I think I changed. Also by going to that school, I discovered Ken Loach and the fact that, in the middle of social realism, there is poetry and truth and not only social commentary hitting you on the head. In the best of these films there's something more that transcends. However, I still have one foot in that kind of formalism. Showing thought patterns in cinema through montage I find very interesting. And it's been appropriated by commercials, but I always try to show that it could be more expressive and, ideally, more complex. [2015]

[on trying to visualize thought patterns in his films] The train of thought. How people think. The structuring of thought, which I think is the temporal experience of images on the screen. We always talk about stories, because it's a literary term and it's very easy to say, but the fact is we're watching images in time and they either correlate or don't with our sensomotoric thought patterns. And it sounds very technical, but I feel it's a fact, you're actually dealing with theme and image when you make a movie, all the time. It can be quick or slow: how do you pace the information? Is it possible to express, to show thinking literally, the association chain of a young boy thinking randomly about his life? Yeah, let's try. That's what I mean with thought pattern.[2015]

I like working intuitively, in what I call dirty formalism, or pop formalism. I jokingly say that our films should be like great albums with different songs. I am a big fan of Nicolas Roeg, Don't Look Now (1973) which could be very specific conceptual things, but it was a warm formalism, it didn't alienate you. I'm also a very big fan of Brian De Palma. I believe in the idea of doing a cinematic set piece, like Conrad's diary, it's like film in itself, or the car crash sequence with Isabelle, and the association of the son thinking of his mother and the last moments of her death, are whole set pieces, a film within the film. So it's like an album. You have different songs, hopefully most of them are hits.[2015]

[press conference for Louder Than Bombs (2015) at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival] We're interested in human stories, first and foremost. We don't usually start out with a plot that we can pitch in two lines; we spend a year brainstorming, discussing ideas that are sometimes not of a visual nature, sometimes just about characters, and then we try to structure the story. We were interested in a polyphonic structure - the different voices of the family creates one story, one through-line. Like in real life - children mirror their parents, siblings mirror each other or differentiate themselves from each other, and I think those central themes opened up the possibility of trying to do something which is cross-generational. Oslo, August 31st (2011) was very much one character. In this one I think it was interesting to explore multiple characters.

[press conference for The Worst Person in the World (2021) at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival] There's something very liberating about writing characters that are not necessarily yourself. You're allowed to draw from people you know and love - imagination - and you can also put a lot of yourself in there to try to empathise with the characters. The question of writing a female character..... I felt it was kind of liberating. It's interesting because when we made the first film, Reprise (2006), together 15 years ago, we were making films about men who were vulnerable and were crying and were emotional, and a lot of people thought that was kind of weird and I think that liberation for both or all genders should be allowed to be complex and emotional. For us that create characters, I think it's all about the human essence of the character more than only gender.

[press conference for Sentimental Value (2025) at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival] Eskil [Eskil Vogt] and I love human stories, we love intimacy of character and we didn't want to make a chamber drama, where people just sit and talk all the time - we want to try and have fun with cinema, as always, play around. I think the house gave us an opportunity to have a bigger perspective on time....the life span, the witnessing of human life and how quick it goes. That's the starting point at least. And also, as a matter of fact, my family had a house that was built by my great-great-grandfather that was sold during the process of writing, and I realise the Gestalt, the specificity of the place as a representation of memory, which is a cinematic theme.

[Cannes press conference for Sentimental Value (2025)] It's trying to find that space of an unconscious approach where you find the ideas to be questions that keep triggering you throughout the several years you work on a project. And many of them come from personal places but you strangely transform it into fiction and thereby see it as another than yourself, through the characters and through the process of collaboration. So it's very satisfying, but then you get these shocks once in a while when you realise what you're really making a film about in yourself. I think that what actors go through and writers and everyone that works on the film. And on this one, I don't think there's anyone who's worked close to me on it that hasn't had some sort of very personal connection because it's about very fundamental stuff. It's about the transference of woundedness and grief through generations and the mysteries of that, whether you believe in the genetics, the psychoanalytics.....if you believe in God, if you're an atheist, you will have to look at yourself through time and look at your parents and see that they also had parents and that it's an ongoing thing. And suddenly you're hit by it and struck by it during the process. It's kind of lovely to finish and send this film out now. I've been kind of living in quite a melancholic place with this one. But it's been wonderful as well.

[Cannes press conference for Sentimental Value (2025)] It's a bit tricky being a film director in the Nordic countries without relating to Bergman, and obviously I'm very, very inspired by Bergman. But the important thing when you have a master and a classic is: What do you take away from it? Bergman was many things. What I've taken away from it is the extreme, aggressive intimacy of the close-ups in his movies. That's really inspired me. The question of being so close to someone, as you are as a viewer when you see those intense, intimate close-ups.....you release your gaze from the social; when you look at someone in a conversation you can't look at them like you can in cinema. You're not allowed to stare that way. It's brutal, it's inhuman, almost. But Bergman taught us that looking at someone very closely, you can both play with the empathy and identification which is a cinematic thing that's at play, yet, the mystery of the other - that I can never reach you quite, as you can reach yourself. That thing in Bergman is an ongoing thing that I feel in many of his films. So I'm not ashamed of close-ups any more - I think we learned from him. And many, many other things.