Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas films a scene from 'Sentimental Value' Christian-Belgaux Everyone involved in Sentimental Value knew it would all come down to the final shot. Joachim Trier's follow-up to his Oscar-nominated The Worst Person in the World (2021) was always going to be a delicate balancing act: An attempt to make a Terms of Endearment-style melodrama without treacle or schmaltz. Sentimental Value stars Worst Person breakout Renate Reinsve as Nora, a celebrated but troubled theater actress, and Stellan Skarsgård as her estranged father, Gustav Borg, a once-great filmmaker. Nora has barely spoken to her father - aside from a few drunken late-night phone calls - since he left her, her mother, and her younger sister Anges (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) after the divorce. Related Stories Guest Column Royally Ghosted: How the Palace Silences Its Own Movies Inside the 25-Year Journey to Netflix's Acclaimed 'Left-Handed Girl' Her mother's death brings Gustav back. Still listed on the deed to the family home - in his family since 1918 - he returns to handle the sale. He's also got reconciliation on his mind. It's been 15 years since Borg's last film, but he's written a new script inspired by his mother's suicide in that same house. He wants Nora to play the lead. (It would also help with financing; she's a star in Norway.) Nora refuses to read it. Gustav goes to the Deauville Film Festival, where they are screening one of his early works: A WWII drama starring a young Anges. In the audience, American movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is so moved she asks to meet him. They strike up a friendship, and Gustav offers her the role he wrote for his daughter - coaching Kemp to mimic Nora's gestures and even dye her hair. The stage is set for a Bergman-esque family drama about identity, legacy, and how art becomes a way to speak the things we can't. Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning in 'Sentimental Value' Courtesy of Neon "The idea of the father in this story was that kind of director who can see something very lucid and clear in his art, but, in real life, is a bit of an avoiding asshole," says Trier. "I found that interesting." "It's something very common among directors," adds Skarsgård. "They can be fantastic at explaining the psychology of a person you're playing and hopeless when it comes to their own life." Sentimental Value unfolds largely inside the Borg family home, a storybook villa layered with a century of memories. "The trigger for the story was when my mother put my grandparents' house up for sale," says Trier. "I realized all of the 20th century had happened in that house. My grandfather was a resistance fighter who was tortured and barely survived, then became a filmmaker, and even went to Cannes in 1960. I think filmmaking was his way of coping with that trauma. It got me and [co-screenwriter] Eskil Vogt thinking about broader things, like how the war affected my family. Does it take three generations to get rid of that?" Finding the right house wasn't easy. "There aren't many villas like this in Oslo," says producer Andrea Berentsen Ottmar. "Usually, the ones that look this beautiful outside are totally refurbished inside and not that soulful." After months of scouting, Trier remembered the house he'd used for the final scene of Oslo, August 31st (2011). "We contacted the owner again, and it turned out to be exactly what Joachim envisioned," says Ottmar. By chance, the owners were leaving on a six-month vacation, and the production could move in. The real interiors served for the modern-day scenes, but for flashbacks - spanning 1918 to the 1990s - the team rebuilt the first and second floors at full scale in a studio. It was Trier's first time shooting period scenes - all his earlier films are contemporary - and he wanted to avoid "making a chamber drama where everything feels stagey and stiff." Renate Reinsve and director Joachim Trier Christian-Belgaux "We talked a lot about Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread and The Master as examples of beautiful period work," says production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen. "We wanted an authentic, lived-in feeling, not some kind of romantic period piece." Larsen researched the house's real history - "there are actually several photos in Norway's national archives, which was handy," he notes - and drew on his own family records. "My grandfather took 5,000 color photographs with his Leica camera from the '40s through the '90s." Larsen combed through them for furniture, art, and wallpaper references. Trier and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen set out to trace that history cinematically. "We had this idea of Gustav, the film-director father, and this house, spanning 100 years, which isn't far from the history of cinema itself," says Tuxen. "So we matched the lenses and film stocks to the aesthetic of each era." Early black-and-white scenes were shot on hand-cranked 16 mm for a jittery 1920s feel. Later decades evolved from 16 to 35 mm, their grit and grain replace