With nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Joachim Trier, and Best Original Screenplay, “Sentimental Value” has emerged as one of the most significant awards-season stories of the year. It is the first Norwegian film ever nominated for Best Picture, a milestone that feels earned rather than symbolic. The film also received acting nominations for all four of its principal performers: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Each is also a first-time nominee, underscoring the precision of its ensemble design.
At the center of that achievement is the screenplay by Eskil Vogt and Trier, a script that distributes emotional weight with uncommon discipline. The film follows two sisters shaped by the same house but very different childhoods. When their estranged father, a filmmaker drawing from personal history, reenters their lives with a script he wants his daughter to star in, the past resurfaces in ways that are subtle rather than explosive. What makes the story resonate is not escalation, but calibration.
For Vogt, the writing process begins long before structure. “We usually attack a film from all directions at the start,” he tells Awards Focus. “We have some ideas, we start talking, we listen to music, and we discuss life.” After three decades of collaboration, he and Trier develop stories through conversation, allowing themes and relationships to surface organically. Early on, they agreed the film would center on siblings who experienced the same household differently due to age, temperament, and timing.
That house became a central organizing principle. Inspired in part by Trier’s own family history and the sale of a longtime family home, it offered a way to reflect on memory and perspective without anchoring the story to autobiography. “We never take direct quotes from our lives,” Vogt explains. “We use all of that and mix it.” The result is a film that feels deeply personal without ever feeling confessional.
The restraint of the writing is most evident in its subtext. Vogt describes his approach as the rule of “two plus two.” “You don’t say ‘four,’” he says. “You say ‘two plus two’ and make the audience add it up.” Dialogue is intentionally pared back, often simple, leaving room for performance to do the work. Meaning accumulates through implication rather than explanation, a philosophy that extends all the way to the film’s final moments.
Maintaining balance across four central characters was a constant negotiation. Gustav’s role, Vogt recalls, “came crashing into the writing room and took up an enormous amount of space.” Containing that force without allowing it to eclipse the sisters’ story became one of the screenplay’s defining challenges. The equilibrium achieved on screen reflects years of refinement across writing, directing, and editing.
In conversation with Awards Focus, Vogt reflects on the origins of “Sentimental Value,” the craft of writing restraint, and the precision required to build a film that trusts the audience to complete the emotional equation.
Awards Focus: It is a pleasure to meet you, Eskil. This is a wonderful film. This story feels deeply personal, almost autobiographical. Having co-written it with Joachim Trier, can you share the origins of the project?
Eskil Vogt: We usually attack a film from all directions at the start. It is not like there is one specific thing that we develop. We have some ideas, we start talking, we listen to music, and we discuss life. We sit in my office where there is a couch, and sometimes one of us lies down on it. It becomes a therapy session. We have been working together for 30 years, so it is a very intimate, safe space.
One of the first things we agreed we wanted to work with was siblings, specifically sisters. We were interested in the idea that you could grow up in the same house with the same parents, but have a very different childhood because of the age gap. Your parents might go through something different while you are at your most impressionable. You also have a different personality than your siblings, so you need something different from your parents. We started working on that quite early and thinking about how we could show those different experiences. We knew we wanted Renate Reinsve, whom we worked with on “The Worst Person in the World,” to be one of those sisters.
We work in a very personal way. We never take direct quotes from our lives, but we use all of that and mix it. There are parts of Joachim’s background here. His father was a film director who was imprisoned during the Second World War. He was affected by that in a negative way, and he used his film and his music as a jazz musician to work through that. That is part of the background of the film.
Another inspiration came from Joachim’s mother trying to sell a house that had been in their family for a while. Sometimes Joachim had to take her calls while we were writing. At one moment, we realized we could use this family house to give us a perspective on how short a lifespan is. It opened up the room in the film to be something larger. So, that is also something inspired by the fabric of Joachim’s life.
AF: The film succeeds in giving each of the four main characters a distinct, individual narrative arc, which is clearly reflected in their Academy Award nominations. Was the screenplay always intended to be such a balanced ensemble piece, or did that evolve over time?
Vogt: It is amazing that they are all nominated, and they are all brilliant in it. When we finally wrote the screenplay, the balance didn’t change that much, but the process of mapping it out did. Obviously, we started with the two sisters. In the beginning, it was more about them dealing with their mother’s sickness and the aftermath of their father walking out of their lives.
Then we started brainstorming. What if the father makes an appearance later, when the spectator doesn’t expect it? Then the Gustav character just came crashing into the writing room and took up an enormous amount of space. We had to rein him in to keep it a story about the sisters. But he also brought an energy that we wanted to give space to. In the beginning, we were actually talking about three sisters. When Gustav came in, we cut one of them. I think the Elle Fanning character kind of became that third sister.
The balance was something we worked on through the whole process. We tried to fine tune it in the writing, and then we continued in the editing with Olivier. We worked a lot on how to leave a character so you feel something has happened to them in their absence. We worked a lot on that for Renate’s character. We had to leave her in the right way so that when you pick her up, you feel she has changed instead of just being on pause. It was a quite difficult balancing act.
AF: The film relies heavily on subtext and long, silent takes. How much of that is explicitly scripted versus discovered through the actors’ performances or Joachim’s direction?
Vogt: It is a group effort, but it is definitely there in the writing. We try to abide by the rule of “two plus two.” You don’t say “four,” you say “two plus two” and make the audience add it up. They will be your friend forever if you make them curious. Bad writing often over-explains and gives information before the audience is curious. We love making people curious by starting in the middle of a scene or having people talk about someone without naming them right away.
The art of movie dialogue is weird because it shouldn’t feel like staged or literary dialogue. I write the first draft of the dialogue and try to challenge myself to be simple, almost banal. The greatest American film dialogue is often just “fuck you,” because you can say that in so many ways. It leaves space for the actor. It can mean “I love you” or “I hate you.” You need phrases that don’t explain themselves. Sometimes I write descriptions of the intentions of the lines instead of writing an obvious line. Joachim likes those moments. Sometimes we add dialogue we hope we won’t need, but it is safer to have it for the edit. I am not the kind of writer who cries if something is cut. If the moment was good and the acting was right without the words, I applaud that.
AF: In the opening, we see Nora’s work as an actress. Was that scene and other acting scenes we see intended to serve as a metaphor or an “Easter egg” for the broader themes of the film?
Vogt: Everything mirrors everything else in this film. There are many similarities between Nora and her father. The play we wrote parts of for that opening sequence is about the last woman condemned for being a witch in Norway. She was tortured for a confession, which for us mirrors the grandmother and the generational trauma. We hope that will be part of the fabric without being too obvious.
That is the magic of film. Everything counts. You can’t do something if it doesn’t mean three things at once. Compared to a television series with eight episodes where you just have to keep it going, a film is a haiku. I love that level of precision.
AF: The ending is very subtle. I interpreted the closing scene of Gustav’s film as a potential rewriting of history, where Nora’s character might not actually commit suicide. Was that a deliberate choice to provide a sense of hope?
Vogt: That was not explicitly intended, but I see where you are coming from and I applaud it. That interpretation is possible because we don’t hear the sound of the chair falling over, which is the sign he would usually put in the film.
What you are latching on to is that we wanted the ending to have hope. By doing this film, Nora is working through something in her life that will help her avoid ending up like her grandmother. That is a fear she has. The idea of the suicide not happening aligns with the idea that the generational trauma stops there and doesn’t repeat itself. That is what we are hoping people will think.
AF: Were you surprised by the global reception of this film, particularly its strong showing with the Academy?
Vogt: We were. Joachim and I wrote “The Worst Person in the World” a few years ago and it had a level of success we never expected, especially in the US with the screenplay nomination. When we landed on the idea for “Sentimental Value,” we looked at each other and said this would be a smaller film. The themes are heavier and more mature. It is not about finding yourself in your late 20s; it is about grown-up people. We thought we would lose the young audience that loved the previous film.
The opposite happened. We have a bigger audience for this one. In Norway, more than a fifth of our audience is teenagers filming themselves coming out of the theater crying and putting it on TikTok. I have no idea why, because they are so young and this is a movie about life experience and being at the end of your life. But they relate to it. The success of this film has been a very happy and surprising experience.
AF: As a nominee yourself navigating the awards season, which other films or filmmakers from this year have particularly impressed you?
Vogt: Some movies don’t need recommendations, like the masterpiece.”One Battle After Another”. I am a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. I also really like “Secret Agent,” which is one of our competitors, but it is a really good film.
Every year there are some really good films that don’t get Oscar attention. The Oscars don’t decide what is good cinema, but they are a great way of getting attention. There is so much noise out there that just having people aware of your film is a huge battle. I also really liked the German film “Sound of Falling.” That was a beautiful film that didn’t get nominated, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t great.
AF: In the official Oscar Luncheon photograph, where can we find you and who are you standing with?
Vogt: I am actually quite near the middle. If you find Timothée Chalamet and Paul Thomas Anderson, I am in the row behind them to the left. It is such a nice luncheon because everyone is just happy to be nominated and everyone gets equal attention. Whether you made a short film or you are Leonardo DiCaprio, it is a wonderful celebration of the whole village it takes to make movies.
AF: Congratulations on a wonderful film and this recognition. Good luck at the Oscars.
Vogt: Thank you.