Anna and Magnus built a life together. They had a home with three kids and a dog. Then they separated. This is where The Love That Remains begins, but as time passes and the reality of their divorce sets in, they’re left to move through a future strained by their unraveling.

Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s latest film echoes the radiant visual language of his previous, the 19th-century period piece Godland and contemporary drama A White, White Day. And though its subject matter is heavy, the tone here is admittedly lighter. The aforementioned dog, Panda, even took home the Palm Dog Award at Cannes this year, which — and I’m being very serious here — is an actual award given out. On the surface, The Love That Remains is a story about normal people with normal feelings and normal problems, like how to raise a family while going through a divorce and what to do when one of your kids — who are played by Pálmason’s children — shoots the other in the chest with a bow and arrow. (He’s fine, but he’s gonna need a new sweater.)

Buried deep are existential questions. “Often I think about what is the meaning of all this? When you go through life, you have moments of doubt about just life and things and what’s the meaning of all of it,” Pálmason tells me. “It’s so silly, all of it.” He’s right. It is silly. It’s also life? As we pass through the seasons with Anna and Magnus, we begin to learn what’s left between them.

The director sat down with The Verge to talk about what it’s like to direct your own kids and how he balanced shooting Godland and The Love That Remains at the same time.

Interview edited and condensed.

The Verge: I want to start here. Godland had such a weighty story. The Love That Remains feels lighter, but I think they share similar themes. Do they feel similar to you? Different? I’d be curious to hear you talk about that relationship.

Hlynur Pálmason: Because Godland was this period film and there’s almost like a heaviness with each period film because you have to create everything. You just can’t just take a camera and start shooting whatever. So there was this feeling of wanting to do something with a little bit different energy, like more playful and something that we could almost just go out and shoot. And also, just with a smaller budget and smaller crew. I mean, it was actually very small in Godland, but even smaller in The Love That Remains.

But there is this thing that I have after I moved back home to Iceland, I was always trying to figure out a way of stretching time so I could have more time with each project, which is difficult because of finances. But we kind of found a way to do it by working in parallel on a couple of projects. But we’re developing and writing and shooting various things. And then when we feel like it kind of has formed and we feel that it’s ready and the energy is ready, we kind of select the project that we move forward with. The Love That Remains, in many ways, has been going on for such a long time. Even the first image we shot was in 2017.

It’s quite a long process. Sometimes when you talk about other projects, they are almost happening parallel. I remember shooting scenes from Godland and the same week, shooting a scene for The Love That Remains, which is crazy to think about.

You keep all these different threads in your head?

Yeah, I think it all kind of… I don’t know. I feel like, I think some people would find it negative if things are talking too much together or eating into each other, like projects. But I kind of like when it happens because it kind of shakes you and makes you even doubt things or pushes the project. If something is turning out really interesting in one project, it kind of feeds into the other one or it kind of pushes the other one to do better. 

I would never be able to make one film at a time, because financially it wouldn’t work at all. And I would only make three films during my lifetime and I would have to have other works, teacher and other things.

The title, The Love That Remains, is really more of a question: what love remains? Was making this film a way for you to answer that?

Often I think about what is the meaning of all this? When you go through life, you have moments of doubt about just life and things and what’s the meaning of all of it. If I’m in a relationship for many years and then we get separated and my fiancée would just find another, what is it? It’s so silly, all of it.

But there’s also a brighter side: how precious time is and how you spend it and actually, who you spend it with and who you decide to spend it with. Because time is probably precious because it moves so fast. You kind of have to, try to capture what you can get or moments with ones you love. And yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about time and you can see that both in Godland and in The Love That Remains, where really, there’s an emphasis on time, on how it moves.

The opening sequence is really lovely. You establish this family by holding a portrait of them at the table. It almost feels like a sitcom, but then the music isn’t sitcom music at all?

Yeah, I did think a lot about after I filmed this image, this image of the roof getting ripped off of the old studio, that was the first image I filmed for the film.

Oh, so that was 2017?

Yeah. And when I had that image, I knew exactly what would happen afterward. And that’s often the case when I’m working. I often don’t know what happens unless I record a sound or I film an image, and then I kind of just react to the image and then I know what happens. It’s kind of like you get stimulated by something you experience or film, and then you write the next scene or you know what’s going to happen. And I think just when I saw this image of the roof, not while I was filming it, because I was not in a good state then, but afterwards, I knew exactly how the film should start.

We should be introduced to each family member and it should be this warm feeling before things begin to fall apart. But also, afterward you begin to find out that it’s actually a fractured family, they’re not together anymore. And often the case is when I’m making something, I know what I don’t want the film to be, but I don’t always know what I want it to be.

It’s fun and playful, but sweet and sincere, too.

But when does it become sentimental? And that’s something that I don’t like. I only like it in a David Lynch film or something. I love it in his films, but I could never do that. So I tried to balance it in a different way, but it is a fine line.

It’s your own children in this film too, right? What’s it like to direct your kids?

It’s fun. But I think it’s okay because I have so many, because basically they’ve been in all my projects except for my debut and also my short films. And so it’s very natural for me to just keep collaborating with them and spending time with them. It’s not something I force them to do. I mean, I do pay them for their work, but I think they also just really like being part of our family or the filmmaker family because it’s a very, very close group of friends and we’ve been working on all of the projects together.

The idea of being a director and having to make many decisions and at the same time, having your kids in the space, I’m sure it adds some fun nuance.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes it’s total chaos, but I think number one is that we have enough time, that we’re not pressed on time. There’s no AD [assistant director] that is saying, “Okay, we have to move.” It’s never happened in my life. We just film until we have something that we like and then we move on. What I like about our sets is that they’re very calm and effortless. There’s no catering, there’s no hierarchy, there’s no chairs, there’s no screens. It’s very, very basic.

The Love That Remains is in select theaters now.

It might surprise you to hear that one of this year’s awards season contenders is a Norwegian film. But it’s not the first time. In 2022, Joachim Trier’s sly, POV-shifting relationship drama The Worst Person in the World snuck into the Academy Awards with nods for Best International Film and Best Original Screenplay. His family-anchored follow up, Sentimental Value, has been pegged as an Oscar hopeful since its big Grand Prix win at Cannes, alongside a number of other European accolades.

Trier’s newest film is tied up in the mess of parental issues. Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) plays a negligent father and a filmmaker himself who has returned with his magnum opus: a script written about his own mother who died by suicide. He’s written the lead role for his daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve, a frequent Trier collaborator). But she’s less than forgiving of her father’s absence and ultimately passes on the part.

As much as Trier’s film operates as a pair of moving character portraits, he believes his use of space and location are just as important. The house where much of the movie takes place is treated as much as a character itself. “It’s like you can smell it, you feel it. And that is cinema to me,” he tells me. (Longtime Trier fans might even recognize the house from a critical scene in Oslo, August 31st, the second of three films in his Oslo trilogy.)

The director talked with The Verge about how he used what he calls a “polyphonic structure” to move Sentimental Value’s narrative through his protagonist’s pain, the key to spotting a good actor in just two minutes, and how process brought together this awards season contender.

I heard that you and [cowriter] Eskil Vogt watch a lot of films while you’re writing. What were you watching while you were writing Sentimental Value?

Joachim Trier: Not as specific references, but I think we love kind of human story films. It’s just inspiration of something being human and entertaining and intimate. I showed the team Opening Night by [John] Cassavetes. This is a great performance piece, and it’s also about someone who is grappling with creativity and the crisis in personal life.

Is that how you like to set the tone?

Yeah, I’m trying not to emulate other films. We do our own thing, but I want to remind people on the team — all of them, my great collaborators, all their assistants and everyone — that we’re shooting on film, 35mm. And there’s a beauty to that and watching on a big screen. So we’ve got a 35mm copy and just the vibe of that film was really beautiful.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but was that the same house from Oslo, August 31st that you shot in?

Ah, you’re very attentive.

It was?

I haven’t told anyone, but, well, you can speculate. Let’s put it like that.

It feels like you have such a tender relationship with that place, and I’m wondering what it is about that specific house that you love.

It’s so weird. It’s like another human being. You just like someone. You think it’s got something. I don’t know what, and that house is very close to where I live. I know the people that live in the house and we looked at a hundred houses to return to that one and look at it. And I walked in and, in 30 seconds, I said, “We’re doing this.”

How does architecture play into how you’re composing shots? What I love about this film is that your exteriors are nice, but your interiors have sort of a romance to them. How do you compose that shot list?

That’s the most intuitive thing that we do, me and the team and the cinematographer, Kasper Tuxen. But I think without sounding too academic, I know for a fact that mise en scène, like the composition of images in the film, the way we structure repetitions, of the way we look at spaces and all that stuff — it matters tremendously. When talking about it, it sounds terribly intellectual, but actually experiencing films, the most exciting thing about them are the moods and the people and the light that hits a special way in a room that reminds us of something.

The triggering of specifics of the tactile nature of the place matters tremendously. It’s like you can smell it, you feel it. And that is cinema to me. And the problem, I just hate talking about it because people think, “What are they talking about?” Close your eyes and look. Think of a David Lynch film. It’s the most mood-saturated cinema you can get. And then people suddenly say, “Oh, wow.” But that’s an aspect in old films regardless of intention.

And sometimes I’ve watched old Norwegian films from Oslo, like stupid gangster comedy series that everyone watched, super mainstream, no critical acceptance. But I love them because they showed Oslo summers in the ’80s during my childhood. And I just look at the backgrounds and I feel something deep in those films even without the narrative being terribly interesting. So that aspect we play with when we make movies and telling a story of a place, of a specific house. You try to capture this specific house for all ideas of a childhood home that people could bring.

In the film, Gustav Borg says he knows a good actor in about two minutes. Is it the same for you? What makes a good actor for you?

It could be so many different things, but sometimes Renate Reinsve came into a casting for Oslo, August 31st, and I saw the tape and I was like, “Wow, cool energy. Like, who is she?”

Is it just energy?

It’s an energy, but it’s also, for example, looking at someone and being curious about their thinking. That’s maybe number one: a good listener and thinker. You look at them and you’re like, “What’s going on in that person’s mind?” Because that draws the audience into interpretation.

Acting, as is all filmmaking, is the shown and the unshown. And good actors will draw you into a space of their interior being a mystery you want to get into.

You move the story along through periodically fading to black. It’s a fun move and it also feels a little slimmed down from Worst Person where you’re explaining the chapters throughout.

True.

Why did you want to move the story through that way?

The story almost starts from what we hope are entertaining fragments of different lives in a family, and then it moves into cohesion and kind of one story of the two sisters and the father. It gets into a sense of flow toward the end, but we’re doing it also to leave space for interpretation and what I call a “polyphonic structure,” where our dramatic is not about pushing the plot all the time but to try to make entertaining enough songs on the album so you listen to the next one and have that as a driving force in the first half. So also emphasizing those ellipses, there’s an absence and then you’re back in and you have to reorient yourself. It creates kind of an interesting energy, I think, in storytelling.

How do you find the right time to introduce those pauses? They happen at the end of moments but are spread throughout the edit too.

No, it’s in the script and then you reinterpret the structuring throughout the edit and find it there. That’s the art of it. That’s the music. It’s hard to explain. It’s an emotional thing.

Do you keep pretty tight to the script while you’re shooting, or you loosen—

We loosen it up. First we rewrite the script while doing some rehearsals just to get the actors to wear the dialogue, bring their own stories. In this case, I felt, for example, that Inga, the younger sister, when I cast her — I think she’s remarkably good, and I hadn’t worked with her before. She’s not very famous, but she was also different than the written character. So we had to adjust. The character of Agnes was written more jovial and wholesome, but she was a little bit more grounded and deep and silent, and I thought, “Oh, that’s more interesting.”

That was a surprise. I’d rather have that. Taking the gifts rather than being sort of anal about your vision. I am all about process.

Because you’re shooting on 35mm, which costs more than digital, do you ever have anxiety about being loose around that? Or do you just kind of let yourself have that space?

Sometimes if we have long rolls of nine minutes and short rolls of four and a half, so if I have a short roll, I can get a roll out if I just loop scenes. But I have in my instincts. Most of my films except for one — like five out of six were shot on 35 and short films on 16 — so that’s how I structure it.

Sentimental Value is such a steady film. With all of its tension, there are no crazy outbursts. Can you talk about striking that balance?

It’s true, and it’s built from more chaos in the beginning when they’re panicked and all that, but it goes into silence almost. This deep intimacy that I’m trying to yearn for with the sisters and all that… I think life’s biggest dramas happens in those silences sometimes. Yes, we can scream and shout, but we turn ourselves off when it’s that level of something aggressive.

So I’m interested in cinema’s capability of trying to reach into those intimate spaces between people. And also we’re allowed to look at each other differently in a movie theater. So the close-up, for example — [Trier leans in] — like in real life, if you sit and stare at someone like that, it’s almost either you’re psychotic or you’re deeply in love or something. But in movies, we’re allowed to look at someone, really their behavior and their pain and their joy and everything in a very intimate space.

Sentimental Value is in theaters now.

Kelly Reichardt has been called one of America’s greatest filmmakers, and also one of its quietest. But her latest, The Mastermind, centered on an art heist that goes off the rails, is probably her loudest movie yet and definitely her biggest budget to date. Reichardt even set out to make something different from her previous work — which includes First Cow, Showing Up, and Wendy and Lucy — only to get back to the editing room and realize, “Oh, there it is. Another one of these films.” Naturally, Reichardt’s crime movie is a character study about a man trying to charm his way out of failure.

The Mastermind stars Josh O’Connor, most recognizable from last year’s Challengers or one of four movies out this fall, including the new Knives Out sequel. (He headlines projects from Steven Spielberg and Joel Coen next.) But while O’Connor is on a trajectory to be a household name, he’s perfectly cast in The Mastermind as a movie star’s foil, the dimly lit thief J.B. Mooney.

As promised, the movie does open with a satisfying heist — a thrown-together choreographed art theft of Arthur Dove paintings, based on a real-life one in 1972 at Worcester Art Museum. For Mooney, stealing the artworks isn’t the hard part; it’s the holding onto them that becomes the problem. O’Connor’s dimpled smile is on display as a man who has coasted aimlessly through life on his good looks and privileged upbringing (his father is a powerful local judge). Family connections won’t get him out of this one, though, as Reichardt describes The Mastermind as an “unraveling” — an “anti-heist” film.

Reichardt talked to The Verge about the challenges of writing and being a budget-conscious filmmaker (and the expense of scenes with cars, shots at night, and her first-ever built-out set), all the while trying to avoid the H-word: heist.

The Verge: Your films tend to have an atmosphere that is unique to you. How do you set the tone of a Kelly Reichardt film?

Kelly Reichardt: I mean, it’s funny, because I always think when I’m starting out that I’m doing something completely different. It’s not going to be like anything I’ve done before. And then I get in the editing room and I go, “Oh, there it is. Another one of these films.” So yeah, I don’t know. I guess everyone has their own kind of footprint, for better or worse. 

Did you find the film in the edit, or how much was it locked in the script?

The script was the script. I mean, there were so many locations and so much car work and so many… I just didn’t have the funds to shoot in a way that I’d find something in the edit. [Cinematographer] Chris Blauvelt and I, we’ve worked together on so many films now. And I talked to Chris about the edit all the time when we’re constructing the scenes and the shots. The edit is part of the conversation, but of course, nothing’s in stone. And you get in the editing room and you go, “Okay, here’s the film I have.” And there are many discoveries to be made in the editing room. But it wasn’t like Meek’s Cutoff.

The concept was that I would have this genre form that I was working in, and then that would, like the character, come undone. It’d really be a sort of aftermath film. That was kind of what I was going for.

But I mean, the shooting has to be so specific because of the amount of time and finances we have. I’m in the editing room with tons of footage to go through and find. It’s nice to have a design and see that come through in the editing room.

I want to dig into the day-to-day of directing The Mastermind. Were you able to buy time in certain places?

I mean, well, there’s so much car work. You’re never buying time when we’re doing car work. Car rigs are slow. And I guess there are nighttime scenes all over the place. Those things all slow you down. I just had this fantastic crew and the locals in Cincinnati were amazing. 

But also, the museum stuff was difficult. We built the interior of the museum in this warehouse — not a soundstage, it was an old warehouse. But it was really exciting seeing it come together. If you had a shitty day of scouting, where you didn’t really have any big catches, you still came back and something was happening in the “museum.” This whole building’s happening and the paintings are getting done and the frames are getting built, and that was exciting. That was its own little world. I haven’t really had any builds in my life, so yeah, it was cool.

Did it make you want to make more of them?

They’re expensive. I like shooting on locations. They have their own challenges. But I thought, “Oh, if we build this, I’ll be able to… For the first time, I’ll have a space that we designed and I’ll be able to really design my shots.” But they were putting it together until the minute before we shot, so I never really had all the time in there I wanted to have.

So we are locked into this kind of big heist film—

Yeah, but I don’t think we should say “heist” because people have expectations. I think it’s almost like an anti-heist film. I showed a cut to a friend and she was mad afterwards, and she said, “Don’t tell me I’m coming to see a heist film, and I’m coming to see this?” And so people should be measured about the heist-ness.

This story could have been told in a lot of different ways. We leave the heist and it becomes a movie about a person traveling and that felt really familiar and warm.

Well, I kind of trapped myself into this because I… whatever. The third act became really difficult because it could have gone in a lot of different ways, as you’re saying. And it just kept becoming like a new first act. And I was like, “Oh, I’m really in the weeds with this.” And I showed it to Jon Raymond, who I have worked with many times. He’s my very close friend and writing partner in a lot of our movies. And I showed it to him and I was like, “I can’t find my way out of the weeds in the third act.” And he went in there with a buzzsaw.

It took a long time for me to let it become the unraveling that I wanted it to be and not keep building it back up. That was a long journey.

As you walk away from the film now, what do you think its thread or through line is for you?

I don’t know. I kind of already am past the point of looking back at it oddly, because now I have to start talking about it. But I’m done with that film. I mean, is there a through line? I think the best way I could put it is how I keep calling it sort of an unraveling or an aftermath, kind of. Depending who you are in the world, either the bigger systems hold you up — there’s no shortage of watching people fail their way to the top, right? And then there’s closer, more intimate relations that pick you up and keep you in place and help you through. And in The Mastermind, we’re watching a character, a dude who kind of burns through all of those.

Everyone’s trying to make sense of this weird moment that we’re in in the world. The Mastermind is about the past, but it still feels like an urgent film. Why did you choose this era to set the story in? Are there things that you find as reflection points?

Well, it’s easier to make sense of a political moment that has passed, right? And to have space and time. I wouldn’t know how you could make a film of the now. And even some that I’ve gone to see, I feel like saying, “Don’t put this on me. I’m not ready to make fun of this time. I’m not ready to find irony in it. I don’t want it.” I thought [Sean Baker’s] Red Rocket did an amazing job of being a politically current film without talking about being a political film. I admired that film for that.

But I guess one way to think about, to ponder where we are, is to look back to this other time. It really wasn’t like the starting point for me. I wanted to tell this little car heist in the film that took place in an era probably every filmmaker my age wants to make. I did not want to make a film that’s full of melancholy or anything like that. I don’t want to romanticize the time.

I mean, my first political memory is being a kid and being in the swimming pool and having to get out of the swimming pool to watch Nixon resign. And that was my first thought of even paying attention to something happening in government or something. Shit, I was pretty young. 

There are a lot of differences in the current time too, right? I feel like now, why aren’t we all out in the streets every minute right now? Where is everybody? In Portland, there’s this one guy on Burnside Street with a “stop authoritarianism” sign, and he’s out there every day by himself, this old guy. And it’s just like, “Where is everybody?” And that’s different about this moment, that moment.

Jeff Buckley captivated an audience of generations with his transcendent voice and soaring guitar. After his untimely passing in 1997 at age 30, he gained posthumous, cult-like status. Never one for the charts, his album Grace has stood the test of time and is listed on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. His live performances were famous for transforming any space, regardless of size, into an intimate listening experience. And his unfinished demos are something fans have collected and traded in forums, treasured like gold.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a new documentary from director Amy Berg, is a heartfelt tribute to an artist adored by fans who ache for more. At the top of the trailer, Buckley tells a reporter that he wants his music to be remembered, because that’s the only thing that will be around after he’s dead. But that’s not how memory works, and the documentary ensures there is space created to grieve the entirety of his loss.

I sat down with Berg in Utah at the Sundance Film Festival, where the documentary debuted. We talked about her love of Buckley’s music and the passionate voicemails he left for his mother that Berg found on the thumb drive with his archives.

The Verge: Can you tell me about the first time you heard Jeff Buckley’s music?

Amy Berg: I was a teenager working at SST Records. And from being in the industry, I heard a copy of Grace. It just kind of cut me open. It got me right in the heart, and I fell in love with Jeff Buckley. I fell in love with “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.” That was my song. And just anytime I had kind of a breakup or some hard time, that was my go-to. It was like he could feel my pain. He massaged my pain. So anyway, when he passed away, it destroyed me.

Sitting in the audience at Sundance, it felt like an ending for some folks — Mary, his mother, and bandmates — but for others in the crowd, it felt like a beginning. They were learning about Jeff’s music. How did you go about striking that balance?

Because of what I was attracted to in the material, I decided to end with his death. There’s a world where it could have started with his death. I mean, there’s a really interesting story post-Jeff’s passing. But I think that what I wanted was for people to get immersed and enveloped in his world through watching the film and then find their own journey to his music and whatever spoke to them. Because it’s such a personal experience. Listening to his music is such a personal experience. So I just kind of want to encourage, especially people who have never heard his music before, to go down that rabbit hole because it’s fun. It’s really incredible.

Biopics are having a moment of sorts — why’d Jeff’s story need to be a documentary?

I was asked to do the biopic at one point, and they gave me this thumb drive with all the archives, and those voicemail messages just cut my heart out. I thought it was a documentary. Sometimes, as a documentarian, I kind of think about fictionalizing real people, and he just seems like a tough one to fictionalize. But then look at Timothée Chalamet and A Complete Unknown. That was one of the most incredible experiences of the year cinematically. So who knows? Maybe. There’s still time. There’s still a movie to be made.

Right.

Mary had to trust me, and it took her a long time because I wanted final cut. And that’s like, I am not going to do a puff piece or anything, and I’m not going to be told what to say and not say. So it was important to me that she trusts me. And that took a while. It took at least 10 years.

I imagine balancing the romance of Jeff’s music and building a narrative wasn’t easy.

It was a really hard edit, and balance is important. I mean, it was difficult because so many people look at Jeff like he walks on water.

And so, there were multiple interviews with certain subjects because I wanted to get to the grit of it, too, and provide a glimpse of a real person who struggled. And I think that he was young. He was very vulnerable, raw, artistic, creative, and held his art to a very high standard. But he was also trying to sort stuff out, and that’s not always beautiful.

The voicemails Jeff left his mother feel particularly startling.

“Your big, sexy son.”

Did you ever hesitate to include those conversations?

No. Because it felt like the real Jeff. There were lots of different versions of Jeff, and I feel like the different voicemails, they illustrate that very well. And they were always part of what I wanted to use in the film.

What were your conversations with Mary like about including them?

She just said, “Here’s the archive. Do what you want with it. Tell the story however you want to tell it.”

I’ve seen some of the journalists saying that there are so many limitations because of Mary, but she didn’t limit me. I wanted to tell a love story about Jeff and the women in his life, and that’s the story I told.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is in select theaters August 8, 2025.

The Beast is a simple film. But told across three timelines, the story between two star-crossed lovers harnesses the memories of our past selves. And that’s what drove Bertrand Bonello, who also directed Nocturama, Saint Laurent, and Tiresia, to tell it.

At first, it’s Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) who is not ready for love. She’s caught in her own dollhouse in Paris. Louis Lewanski (George MacKay) tries to swoop her away but is left lovesick. A century later, we meet these same characters again, this time in Los Angeles. The roles are reversed, but it’s the same story. Louis is now an incel. He drives around the city recording selfie videos of his preparations for retribution. He meets Gabrielle — and she’s interested in him — but he doesn’t have the emotional capacity to be with her.

Spliced in between these stories is another. It’s set in a future where we bathe in black liquid. Xavier Dolan purifies your DNA with the help of robotic arms. And yet — in all this fantasy, people still go dancing at retro clubs. Gabrielle and Louis meet. And then once again, they lose each other.

I met Bonello at the Criterion offices on a rainy day in April, where we sat down to discuss why the future looks like James Turrell and why young directors need to be obsessed with the story they want to tell.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

How long have you been working on The Beast?

I started to write it in 2017. It was a long, long, long process. At one moment, there was a 1936 period. Then it became a mini-series, four times an hour. Then it was lost. So I stopped for a year, and I did a film called Zombi Child. Then I came back after this film, I reread my 250 pages, I said, “Okay, there is a feature somewhere. I have to find it.” So I dove into the writing, cut, cut, cut, cut, and then I started to find the form of the film you saw, and then we started to finance and stuff like that.

Did it still have its urgency when you returned to it?

The Beast was a long process. The most difficult thing was to keep the obsession for so long.

How do you do that?

Sometimes when there are some young directors that come to me and say, “What quality do you need,” I say obsession. Because it’s not only having an idea; it’s having an idea that you will still like three years after because it’s just very long, making films.

And it’s going to live for a really long time.

Yes. But after that, it’s not my problem. But I was very happy.

How much time do you spend thinking about the longevity of a film, knowing that it’s going to exist forever?

I don’t really think of that, but I had a huge retrospective in Paris a few weeks ago. You live in the present and the future, but retrospective means one moment. They ask you to stop and to look back, and it’s a moving experience because, for the audience, it’s just films. But, for me, it’s part of my life. You remember, “This film, my life was that.” It’s very intimate, in fact, to do this.

Could you talk to me a little bit about the structure of The Beast? There’s a split that happens halfway through the film between 1910 to 2014, and then you splice the future in throughout that. Did you find that structure in the edit, or did you always know?

No, no, no. The film you saw is exactly the film that is in the script. Everything. The most challenging thing was not to make three films. This is what was the main line, to find the structure. It’s not like you have a little 2044, then 1910, then ’14, then ’44. It has to be a little more mixed up so it makes only one film. When something happens in 1910, you have to ring a bell in 2014 that reminds you that it’s the same character because the same… It has not to be three characters but one character. The Gabrielle of 2044 is the Gabrielle of 1910 plus the Gabrielle of 2014. It’s the way I had to think. That’s why it was so long to write, because it’s quite tricky. It’s like it has to be a mix of poetics and mathematics.

It’s the math that is the most interesting because, from what I’ve read, you have a strong background in music. I always think about how much music has rhythm. You’re moving with the moment. 

In fact, I do the music at the same time as the writing. I’m lucky to be a musician, so I have my study and I have my studio, and I keep going from one to another. If I start to write a scene that needs music, I stop writing. I go to the studio and try to find some sounds and some stuff like that. In the script, you have exactly the beginning of the music, end of the music. It’s written on the script. If there is a scene with a song that is not mine, I have to find the song. It’s part of the writing for me. It’s as important as a dialogue or a description.

How did you come up with the character of Louis in 2014, the incel character? He seems like a guy who spends a bit too much time on 4chan.

Ten years ago, when I discovered these videos of [mass murderer] Elliot Rodger, I was really, really impressed, in fact. Besides the fact that the guy was a psychopath and killed women, just talking about the videos, I was very impressed by the tone of his voice, by the choice of the words, by something very calm, which freaked me out more than if… It’s not Jack Nicholson in The Shining. It’s like, “Argh, I hate women.” It stayed in my mind. 

I wanted to find an idea more close to our time to switch the stuff, and I was thinking about the incels. There is something about loneliness in incels, and, in a way, this kind of loneliness, in a way more primed. There is something of being afraid also. What Lewanski says, “They don’t want me, I hate them, I will kill them,” but there is maybe something that is unconscious, is, “I’m afraid of abandon.” I found that very interesting and contemporary to go through this kind of character to talk about the fear of love. So that was the starting point.

Both your films, Coma and The Beast, have political moments in them, and Louis Lewanski feels like he’s so political in many ways, but it’s kind of removed from the character. He’s just an incel. How much did you want to bring in the political versus how much did you want to keep it away?

I didn’t want it to be too expressed but to be there. In a way, the most political period is the 2044 section of the film because it’s like a resume of the catastrophe we are in today. What’s great with science fiction is that you create a world that is talking about your fear of today and your political fear also.

About 2044 — I was curious about the set design because it felt like James Turrell to me. 

With the DP (director of photography Josée Deshaies), of course we thought about Turrell. I don’t know. I know it’s not brand new, but it’s obvious.

It’s comforting.

I know. I know. For me, it gives the touch that, yes, we are talking about ecology and stuff like that. What will be the lighting in the houses in 20 years? 

But you are the first one who noticed.

Really?

Yes.

When you think about what you want to work on next, what comes to mind? I’m sure you’re already deep into whatever that thing is going to be.

[Takes big hit from vape] No, not really. I’m taking notes for the moment. This film was a huge work, and I put a lot of things in the film, and I feel a little empty, so now I have to fill myself a little.

So you’ll take a few months off?

No. I’m finishing the promotion, and I’ll take maybe a week.

You won’t take much time at all.

No. After, I start to anguish.

A building is on fire; we don’t know why. A principal at an elementary school trips a kid at the grocery store; we don’t know why. A student gets in a fight with a classmate, leading to a messy altercation with a teacher; we don’t know why.

Monster is a return to form for veteran filmmaker and king of breaking hearts, Hirokazu Kore-eda, who also directed Nobody Knows, Broker, and 2018 Oscar-nominee Shoplifters. In his new film, the director contrasts the curiosity of childhood with the assumptions of adulthood. Because in Monster, understanding why someone would light a dead cat on fire might seem complicated, but wanting to know what happens after we die is a pretty straightforward question. 

I had the chance to speak with Hirokazu Kore-eda earlier this week, and we dove into the importance of building a world for his films, how to find the emotional climax of a story, and why he’s so uncomfortable with strong male protagonists. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

There’s something interesting in how Monster is structured; in three acts, it almost feels episodic. The screenwriter, Yuji Sakamoto, has written primarily for TV. Did that shift the way you approached directing this film?

Many viewers of this film compare it to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and I think that might be a little bit of a mistake. But when I have seen some of Mr. Sakamoto’s television series, for example, from episode one through four, it’s told from the woman’s perspective and then from episode five on, it’s told from the man’s perspective. He shifts the viewpoint that way. So when I read this script treatment, I thought, “This is similar to what he has done in television series work.”

You wrap up a lot of the thematic threads in the third act and that’s where you land the emotional moments, too. When you’re directing, how do you know it’s the right time to land that emotional punch for the viewer?

When I read the script, I thought that the emotional climax was in the music room where the principal and protagonist play music together. But then as I shot the film, this wasn’t really in the script. There is a time when the mother and the teacher are looking for the boys and they’re wiping away the mud on the abandoned train car. So I thought that was another very cinematic way of showing the climax from the adults’ point of view. As I’m shooting the film, I sometimes discover where an emotional scene might be. And I do that while I’m shooting it on-site, so to speak, to find that meaning.

It’s that first moment in the third act where Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi) is being bullied and Minato Mugino (Soya Kurokawa) comes to his aid. That’s where I felt it first. And then everything after that is equally devastating.

As I read the plot treatment initially, of course, it was very interesting and I saw that Mr. Sakamoto clearly showed what he meant and that what was really important was the children’s world that they had created. So I put all my energy in trying to create that world of the children.

The characters in Monster — young and old — all share this conflicted feeling of shame. When you were working on set with these actors, did you find yourself giving different types of direction to embody that emotion?

The actors who played the teacher and the principal are long in the stable of actors who have played in Mr. Sakamoto’s television dramas. So they really know what he’s trying to express and how to express it. They knew much better than I about how to do that, so I wasn’t fretting about that. They already had the answers within them. 

For the children, for the boys, I repeatedly told them, “Don’t show your emotion. Show what you are hiding. Think about what you don’t want other people to know about you and how you would act in that way.” That’s what I told them to do. I think they did a very good job of doing that.

A lot of your films, for me, have felt queer in nature — if not in story. Monster felt like one of your more direct attempts at navigating that discourse. Can you talk about how you went about approaching that?

When you say you thought that my films are queer in nature, what aspect do you mean? How did you feel that?

When I think about American films that I’ve seen; there’s this performance of masculinity that feels toxic. But across your work, for example in Broker, Shoplifters, Nobody Knows — there’s this softness to all the characters. They feel human.

I think you’re asking how I see human relationships and you mentioned the strong male figure in American films, but that’s not something I experienced. That’s not what I grew up with. So it’s very hard for me to identify with a strong male type figure, and I really don’t feel comfortable with a strong male protagonist. So that’s probably why they don’t appear.