When she walks from the restaurant and she looks down on
the city and she goes into the party,
the first thing Joachim told me is that
that is the most important scene for me.
That's a big heart in the movie.
I was really preparing and I wanted the shifts to
be really specific so that she walks from
there because she thinks she's bored.
Then looking down at the city she
realizes like in an existential way
that she is really sad,
and that she doesn't know where she is in life,
and that surprises her,
and she tries to get away from it.
Then she gets destructive and tries to flirt with Sam
too and have her own fun to get away from that sadness.
But so I don't know really where to
start in asking you like about everything.
I haven't talked a lot to you since all of this happened.
I may have seen
you in my garden the summer before,
I think and then I haven't seen you since.
Yeah, and then you were on the shoot for
my TV series and then you were
done shooting Worst Person In The World,
but it was before all the craziness
of awards and before it had premiered
Yes.
Yeah, I got to see a bit in that period in-between.
Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
How do you feel? [LAUGHTER]
Do you want a Norwegian answer or
you want proper answer. [LAUGHTER].
If you can give me the Norwegian answer I'll take it.
No, but I'm so happy and so euphoric all the
time because it's like living a dream
and I never ever
thought that anything like this would happen.
I'm even almost exhausted from being so
happy all the time and getting so many great news.
I feel every single day we get
something like really great
happening to the movie and people responding.
Paul Thomas Anderson in
the Q&A I started crying he said like,
when you do the scene it's the best acting in the world,
and I just started crying.
Crazy stuff happening every single day.
I am honestly very tired from traveling.
You want to be
present in every moment and you want to enjoy it,
so you try to turn it on for every moment.
But it's lasted for so long
and like you said, when is it going to end?
I'm waiting for it to end [LAUGHTER],
but it never ends.
You have probably talked a bit about it before.
But the script of The Worst Person In
The World compared to the finished movie,
since it is the
first or the second film that Joachim does with
a female lead and it's a lot
of female observations or thoughts,
does that all come from the script when you
first read it or is some of it
your observations or did
you bring a lot into the script?
Yeah, I feel like Joachim was really
humble and he was
very scared when I read it the first time.
Because I think for them
they're not writing female character.
They started writing a person and then
a part of her identity is being a woman,
and they have a lot of curiosity,
and empathy with the people that they meet,
and that they know.
I think they had written
some scenes where a girl doesn't feel that she's
heard or that she has as much value in
a conversation in that cabin scene
and nuances like that was there.
But I felt that I needed to add something because I
was scared that she would seem a bit
passive maybe from the script.
Maybe it was a bit romanticized
that Aksel was defining Julie and
that it was a romantic gesture
that he was telling her who she was.
That I felt was very problematic.
The argue in the breakup scene a lot of that is,
not everything, of course,
but I had some key lines that I improvised about her,
it should be a strong place
to just be in chaos, and just feel,
and be in that space too,
and not knowing what to say all the time,
and analyzing everything all the time.
That was my perspective.
But I feel it was building
on top of something that was good that was already there.
They really let me into the process
and really wanted my opinions
and he also chose to use
that in the final cut.
It really felt like we were
cooperating on making that character.
It seems like you guys bring your own experiences into it
to make that possible to make something so relatable.
Yeah. We just had a lot of
very funny conversations about
the situation where you want to cheat,
but you can't do it, so you see where the limits go.
We also had very deep conversations,
existential conversations about loss,
like the loss of the image of yourself,
the thing you thought you would be and you aren't,
and the loss of a person.
I feel that a lot of preparation was
actually about everyone involved
being really honest with all the themes.
I had to find nuance in flirting and falling in love.
It's not only that you're charming,
and that you're cool,
and you want to be your best self.
But it's also you bring your shame and your sorrows and
all the things you think is fucked up by
yourself into meeting someone.
Yeah.
It was just making it
as detailed as possible and making it
as contradictory as possible in every single scene really.
How was it like technically working with Joachim?
Is he very specific technically?
Did you move?
How is that process working with him?
Very different from scene to scene because
some scenes you're working with just say, run.
Look at the sun.
Look. Then everyone with a camera,
every focused polar, everyone would just
run and we shot and filmed.
But it was a big operation to move.
But we will run down
and Joachim would just scream, "Walk Renate.
Walk." Then we would just
do it and then sometimes some things we did
very technical and we
knew where we needed to go and wanted to go.
But he always does a jazz take after we nail it.
He says do whatever you
want and we can be free and do whatever we want.
It does seem very much light.
It doesn't seem very strict at all.
It seems really free when you watch it, I guess. Yeah.
Joachim really loves to harvest,
like make a lot of preparation,
and it's a really solid script,
and he knows what he wants,
and he is very specific about how he wants it to look,
and the themes of the movie,
and then he has enough confidence
to let people be very free.
Then he harvests and uses
that for the feel
that it's alive and spontaneous in the movie.
Yeah. I wish you so much luck Renate with everything.
Thank you. I'm so happy you did this,
you had this interview.
So nice to see you. [LAUGHTER]
Yeah, it was so nice to see you too.
[LAUGHTER] I'll see you
as soon we've done, everything is over.
Bye