Five hard-won lessons from the Oscar-nominated Norwegian director on structure, character, and the year-long room

What Joachim Trier and Sentimental Value Can Teach Every Screenwriter

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value arrived this awards season as one of the most celebrated films of the year: nine Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt. The Norwegian drama — which follows two adult daughters navigating their relationship with their estranged film-director father after the death of their mother — won the Grand Prix at Cannes and became a genuine cultural touchstone for audiences who found its portrait of family grief and inherited trauma both devastating and humane.

Recently, Trier sat down with screenwriter and podcaster John August on the Scriptnotes podcast (Episode 724) to discuss exactly how he and Vogt approach the writing process. The conversation, which is available on John August’s website, is one of the most instructive screenwriting discussions of the year. These five lessons stood out.

Lesson One: Spend a Year in the Room Before You Write a Draft

Trier and Vogt, who have collaborated on six feature films, spend approximately one year in conversation before they produce a complete draft. They meet in person every morning during the development phase, talking through characters, structure, themes, and what Trier calls the “mystery” of how family members become who they become. Sentimental Value began with the question of two adult sisters who feel fundamentally different about their shared family history — and why. That question, and the conversation it generated, preceded any formal writing by many months.

This is not an approach that most working screenwriters, particularly those in development deals with studio deadlines, can fully replicate. But the principle behind it — that a screenplay needs to be understood deeply before it is written, not just plotted — applies at every level of the craft.

Lesson Two: Let Material and Character Drive Structure

Trier is explicit about the fact that he and Vogt do not begin with story and then find characters to illustrate it. They work the opposite way: characters and material come first, and structure emerges from what those characters need. “We almost want to hang our material and our characters” on the structure, Trier explained on Scriptnotes, rather than forcing characters into a pre-existing narrative frame. This approach, when it works, produces films that feel genuinely alive because the story is doing what the characters’ lives demand, not what a template requires.

Lesson Three: Introductions Are Promises

August specifically pressed Trier on the opening of Sentimental Value, which he described as one of the most assured character introductions he had encountered in recent cinema. Trier explained that how you introduce a character — the specific image, the specific action, the specific context — makes a promise to the audience about what kind of story this will be. The opening of Sentimental Value places the audience immediately inside both Nora’s world and her interiority in a way that earns their trust for the duration of the film. Getting that right, Trier said, is one of the most consequential decisions a writer makes.

The No Film School breakdown of these lessons is worth reading alongside the full transcript for writers who want to go deeper into Trier’s specific techniques.

Lesson Four: The Film About Time Needs Time in Its Structure

Sentimental Value covers many years and several seasons within the Borg family home. Trier described the film’s temporal structure as something like a family album — capable of jumping between intimate moments and more essayistic observations about how time passes, between different points of view, and between radically different emotional registers. This kind of polyphonic structure, where the film shifts who is driving any given sequence, requires the writer to establish clearly when and how those shifts are occurring. Trier called this essential to the film’s meaning: the subject is time and memory, and the structure had to embody that subject.

Lesson Five: The Ending Is Not a Resolution — It Is an Organic Arrival

Trier is philosophical and somewhat cautious about endings. He does not believe in neat conclusions, but he does believe in what he calls an “organic dramaturgical feeling” that a story is now ending — a sense of arrival rather than closure. In Sentimental Value, the final scene between Nora and her father encapsulates multiple thematic threads without resolving them cleanly. It gives the audience “just enough to keep thinking about,” in Trier’s words. For writers prone to either over-explaining or abandoning their endings in the final act, this distinction is worth sitting with.

The full Scriptnotes transcript is available at John August’s transcript page. Writers who want to read the screenplay itself should consult Deadline’s Read the Screenplay feature, which published the full script as part of its awards season coverage. And for those who want to study the film’s structure in the context of European vs. American screenwriting conventions — a distinction Trier and August discussed with real specificity — this conversation is as good a starting point as exists anywhere in the public record.