Sentimental Value, director Joachim Trier’s multicharacter tragicomedy, posed unique challenges for Oscar-nominated editor Olivier Bugge Coutté. Among them was deciding where to take Elle Fanning’s character, American actress Rachel Kemp, who is creatively courted at a French film festival by auteur filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by best supporting actor nominee Stellan Skarsgard.
In addition to Kemp’s backstory, her arc explored her motivation for eventually leaving Borg’s project as well as “who he is as a person and what he does to her,” says Coutté. “It had nothing to do with Elle’s performance. It was purely because of the weight of her character.”
Jokes Coutté, who often collaborates with Trier but only reads his scripts a few weeks before filming begins: “Maybe I should have read it sooner. I could have saved production a lot of money.”
Another challenge for Coutté was to cut down the film festival sequence, which initially clocked in at 26 minutes. With the movie’s run time now at a touch over two hours minus the credits, the editor says the first full cut was “eight or nine.”
“We intuitively knew [the film festival scene] had to be cut by at least 10 minutes,” he recalls. Coutté wanted to shift the focus back to Renate Reinsve’s Nora, Borg’s daughter and the film’s main protagonist, more quickly. “You can’t stay away for 26 minutes and expect the audience to hang on to [Nora’s] story,” he confesses. “My job is like the acrobats spinning plates.”
While Sentimental Value uses montages in various ways, one in particular layers the faces of key characters and wasn’t in the original script.
“It’s shot in-camera,” Coutté explains. “[Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen] shoots a close-up, rewinds the film, exposes it, and shoots on top of what he has exposed.”
Coutté knew exactly how to use this “artistic comma,” which was added to the film two weeks before picture lock, revealing: “It’s just before the film takes a turning point. What it means exactly, I don’t know, but it’s like saying, ‘Wake up, because now things are going to happen.’ ”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.