Experiencing it for the first time during its 59th edition, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival proved—at least for this critic—both formidable and revitalizing. The same can be said for the very best of the films that screened all week long in this scenic spa town in the Czech Republic. Still, there was ample energy to be harnessed even outside of the movies, from goings-on about town to Karlovy Vary’s blend of awe-inspiring architecture and natural splendor. 

That thousands of spectators descended each day on the historic city centre, between pop-up tents and colonnades, never quite disrupted the town’s idyllic qualities. However, one can imagine that Karlovy Vary feels very different—less lively, more lulling—outside of the festival. Going to see films each day between the Grandhotel Pupp and the Hotel Thermal, walking riverside beneath vibrant facades of various spas, restaurants, and hotels, I often encountered groups of passerby queued up to sample mineral waters from the city’s springs, alongside others in line to secure free glasses of Prosecco or mugs of Pilsner Urquell that festival sponsors kept flowing. So ubiquitous is the latter around Prague that it’s cheaper here to drink beer than bottled water. 

Coinciding with the end of the school year, the festival attracted an energetic crowd of students from throughout Europe, who see Karlovy Vary as an ideal destination to see films, catch up with friends, and party around town—often all in one evening, which accounts for why an ambient buzz of activity subsisted long into the night, every night. Scores of young attendees took advantage of this summer atmosphere and pitched campsites in a designated “tent city” area not far from the promenade. Most of them spent more time watching films than sleeping under the open sky; the day breaks early in Karlovy Vary, and birds had started singing by the time most of these cinephiles returned from late-night showtimes to recharge their batteries. 

Each day, ticket offices drew lines that stretched back hundreds of meters; some slept in line to improve their odds. Not all of the cinemas showing films around Karlovy Vary are as sprawling as the 1131-seat Grand Hall in the Hotel Thermal; indeed, three venues in another area of the hotel, which also host press screenings, all seat between 63 to 70, and the hillside Husovka Theatre, a short climb away from the city centre, seats 96 adjacent to a snug outdoor bar. There’s a charming makeshift quality to such venues, all of Karlovy Vary making whatever modifications necessary to amplify the communal enthusiasm for cinema that enlivens this festival.

At Karlovy Vary, Celebrating Film In All Its Forms

As a newcomer to Karlovy Vary, it was striking to experience excitement on the ground for film in all forms—not just Cannes-premiered awards contenders, like Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” or starry retrospectives like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” presented by producer Michael Douglas and co-producer Paul Zaentz on its 50th anniversary. Here, boundary-pushing works in the Imagina section, from Mark Jenkin’s “I Saw God’s Face in the Jet Trail” to Ondřej Vavrečka’s “1+1+1” (on Super 8 and 16mm, respectively), animated as many discussions as titles in Pragueshorts and the films in Afterhours (a midnight section where 4K restorations of “The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre” and “Hellraiser” screened alongside the likes of “Dangerous Animals”). Others told me they had been devoting their time to watching the works of American actor John Garfield, ten of which were presented in a festival sidebar. (“It’s a pure masterpiece,” one critic raved to me of “Body and Soul,” a chiaroscuro boxing drama of bloody noses and punch-drunk fatalism that Garfield made with Robert Rossen.) 

Over 130 films screened during the festival, which has accrued a reputation as a “programmer’s festival” in that it brings together breakout titles from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Venice, and more to showcase a veritable cream of the crop. For critics and film-industry professionals alike, it’s an invaluable opportunity to catch up. 

Outside of competition titles reviewed in the previous dispatches, I was most enthralled by “Dreams (Sex Love),” the Golden Bear winner at Berlin this year. From Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, who has made two other films that form a thematic trilogy, this electrifying and elastic ode to the creative process follows a teenager whose hopeless crush on a teacher compels her to spill everything she has experienced into a novella. With her writing related in voiceover narration, truth blurs with fiction, and the reality of what happened is left up to a growing number of readers. While others debate the nature of the heartache she expresses in lyrical prose, “Dreams” reflects on the meaning we create from memories as we make art that turns them into something else entirely. 

From Ira Sachs, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” which I’d missed at Sundance, similarly draws seismic emotion from a monologue, as the renowned photographer (Ben Whishaw) tells his friend, the journalist Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), about the previous day’s events. Mundane and contained though it was, Hujar’s remembrance of one day in 1970s New York becomes an exhumation of that time and place, the people who moved through it, and his own role in their passage: observing, recounting, preserving. 

Another kind of memorial is Akinola Davies’ debut “My Father’s Shadow,” which relives a day in 1990s Lagos through the eyes of two young brothers (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo, Godwin Egbo) finally getting to know the father (Sope Dirisu) they’re about to lose; it’s a gorgeous, mournful gesture of a film, like a handprint that lingers on skin, reflecting as “Aftersun” did on dynamics of absence and presence in all the agonized, unfinished relationships we share with our fathers. 

Hlynur Pálmason’s “The Love That Remains” similarly sees filmmaking as sculpture, and time as its raw clay; working with immediate surroundings, the Icelandic filmmaker cast his children in this tragicomic portrait of a family coming apart, resulting in a film—shot piecemeal over years—that’s as loosely structured as it is precisely composed, with some of the strangest images anywhere at the festival. 

“Better Go Mad in the Wild,” “Sand City” Triumph at Karlovy Vary’s Awards Ceremony

Films competing for the Crystal Globe premiered across the week, and the ultimate winner only screened in the festival’s final days. As announced during the festival’s Saturday-night closing ceremony, Slovak filmmaker Miro Remo’s charming docufiction hybrid “Better Go Mad in the Wild,” about two eccentrics in their sixties living in the forests of Sumava, won the section’s Grand Prix, becoming the first homegrown title to earn top honors at the fest in eight years. 

Jurors Nicolas Celis, Babak Jalali, Jessica Kiang, Jiří Mádl and Tuva Novotny said in their jury statement that Remo’s “delightfully inventive documentary” doubled as “a funny valentine to the fading art of being true to yourself,” adding, “‘Better Go Mad in the Wild’ feels like a gulp of fresh, woody air, or a quick dip in an outdoor pond, or a moment of contemplation as a cow chews on your beard. In short, it feels like being free.” On stage, joked Remo, “If I knew it would be such a huge event, I would have worn a bowtie.” 

A special jury prize, meanwhile, was awarded to “Bidad,” Soheil Beiraghi’s account of a Gen Z singer’s one-woman resistance to Iranian authority. “I thank Iranian women for not being afraid; they taught me not to be afraid,” he said through a translator. “They don’t need to be pitied — they need to be applauded,” he added, prompting a standing ovation. In a surprise twist, the jury split their best-director prize between 33-year-old Lithuanian director Vytautas Katkus for “The Visitor” and 25-year-old French director Nathan Ambrosioni for “Out of Love,” honoring two films “that represent opposite ends of the spectrum in approach yet are each, individually, deeply impressive directorial statements,” per their statement.

Norwegian actress Pia Tjelta took home best actress for “Don’t Call Me Mama,” about a teacher who has an affair with one of the refugees she mentors at a local asylum centre, while Spanish actor Àlex Brendemühl won best actor for “When a River Becomes the Sea,” in which he plays the stoic father of a woman recovering from sexual assault. A special jury mention was awarded to Czech newcomer Kateřina Falbrová, who was first cast in “Broken Voices” at age 12, in the role of a singer preyed upon by her choirmaster. Finally, the Právo Audience Award went to “We’ve Got to Frame It! (a conversation with Jiří Bartoška in July 2021),” the festival’s opening title. 

Jurors for the Proxima sidebar section included Yulia Evina Bhara, Noaz Deshe, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias and Marissa Frobes. In Proxima, the Grand Prix winner was “Sand City,” a visually striking tone poem set in the city of Dhaka, by first-time Bangladeshi feature filmmaker Mahde Hasan, while the special jury prize was awarded to “Forensics,” by Federico Atehortúa Arteaga, which uncovers connections between stories of the disappeared in Colombia. Special mention was awarded to Manoël Dupont’s “Before / After,” from Belgium, about two men who bond over their receding hairlines while traveling to Istanbul to visit a hair-transplant clinic there.

At the ceremony, Stellan Skarsgård—star of “Sentimental Value,” which he discussed with RogerEbert.com—was also presented with the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema. “I’m not dead yet,” he joked on stage. “I thought I was too young for this.” Another milestone moment came as the festival bestowed a KVIFF President’s Award on the legendary Czech editor Jiří Brožek—its first such recognition for an editor. Earlier in the week, the festival had him introduce a screening of Karel Kachyňa’s “The Death of the Beautiful Deer,” a Czech classic, in the historic Karlovy Vary Theatre. 

Dancing with Ghosts, as KVIFF Comes to a Close

After one final screening of Jay Duplass comedy “The Baltimorons,” the closing-night party got going an hour before midnight, as the halls of the Grandhotel Pupp turned into a free-for-all of food, drink, and festivity. Members of the juries, sworn to secrecy during deliberations, could finally cut loose amid a sea of stars. A downstairs dancefloor at the intimate Bechers Bar—a late-night VIP haunt throughout the week, though all of its tables were exclusively reserved this year for sponsors who largely left them unoccupied, making for a curious visual most nights of the festival—filled up as the night went on, reaching peak capacity around four in the morning. 

Empty chairs at empty tables, in another context, reflected Karlovy Vary’s overarching tribute to Jirí Bartoska, its late president, whose death in May hung heavy over the festival. Since 2008, KVIFF screenings have all been prefaced by cinematic trailers featuring past laureates of the festival’s major awards. Czech actor Bolek Polívka appeared in this year’s film, in which Polívka—a long-time friend of Bartoska—sits at a table in a bar and orders whiskeys for himself and an unseen acquaintance. As the camera turns, the audience realizes nobody is sitting across from him, and that Polívka is addressing the late Bartoska, sliding a photograph of the actor across the table and telling him, “to hang it up somewhere, there.” At the closing-night ceremony, Bartoska’s remembrance was met with sustained applause; many were seen wiping away tears. 

In a tragic turn of events, hours after “Better Go Mad in the Wild” won the Grand Prix—Crystal Globe in Karlovy Vary, one of its two subjects—Czech poet František Klišík—was found dead in a pond in the Czech village of Ohrobec, where he’d been celebrating the film’s success. Klišík’s death is still under investigation, but word of his unexpected passing at 62 reached Remo as he returned home the next day, still buzzing from victory. In a public statement addressed to Klišík, a grief-stricken Remo turned to his subject’s words, from one of the poems that featured in their film: “Life is a momentary illusion, a cry into silence, a foolish effort, a cup forced upon you, a sip of delicious taste, a prerequisite for death, which then is our certainty, a prerequisite for life.”

It’s hard to know what to say about a celebration like Karlovy Vary concluding with such stark and successive notes of legacy and loss, other than that reminders were everywhere this week of the role cinema plays in helping us make sense of mortality. At its best, the projector’s flickering light can immortalize; its pictures of ghosts make the past present once more. Paying tribute to a late luminary who made the festival what it is today, Karlovy Vary looked back even as programmers trained their gaze forward, making for a headlong rush of a festival in which it was nevertheless easy to feel suspended in time: savoring every second at the end of one era, caught between gratitude and heartbreak at the onset of another.

At the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, no honorary award is more prestigious than the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, bestowed annually on an individual who has made significant contributions to the art of filmmaking. 

Stellan Skarsgård, who received the Crystal Globe at this year’s festival, most certainly fits that description, as his performance in the film he presented Friday to Karlovy Vary audiences—Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value”—so potently distills. 

In Trier’s tender and emotionally resonant family drama, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, Skarsgård plays a once-revered director whose efforts to revive his career by making his most deeply personal film to date lead him back to his estranged daughters. It’s another formidable, finely nuanced performance by Skarsgård, whose character struggles to reconcile decades of distance through his artistic process even as his daughters’ grief and resentment over his absence in their childhood force him to excavate his relationship to their family history more deeply.

Few actors have flowed as effortlessly as Skarsgård between arthouse and mainstream, and the Swedish actor has spent decades making clear his talent in films of all types, from his collaborations with Danish director Lars von Trier (“Dancer in the Dark,” “Melancholia”) to his involvement in bigger-budget productions like Denis Villeneuve’s two-part “Dune.” 

Presenting “Sentimental Value” in the Great Hall of the Hotel Thermal, KVIFF artistic director Karel Och noted Trier won the Best Director award from KVIFF in 2006 for his debut film “Reprise” and hailed Skarsgård as “one of the most admired European actors.” On stage, Skarsgård called his latest work “one of the more dear films that’s close to my heart” and praised co-stars Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas; the latter co-presented the screening alongside Skarsgård. 

Earlier in the day, Skarsgård also participated in a KVIFF Talk, during which he reflected on his wide-ranging career. “I wanted to be a diplomat at first,” the actor revealed to an audience in the Hotel Thermal’s Congress Hall during the event, which was hosted by The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg. At 16, a role on Swedish TV series “Bombi Bott och jag” (“It was like a Swedish Huckleberry Finn”) propelled him to local stardom, but it was Skarsgård’s younger brother who’d sent in both of their applications: “I think he was very pissed off. Everyone saw it, including 14-year-old girls. That was a positive for me.”

Skarsgård has never been afraid to speak his mind, and one memorable moment came when he expressed personal distaste for filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, with whom he’d worked on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg’s “A Dream Play.” The 74-year-old Swedish actor, who has shared similar sentiments over the years, described a “complicated relationship” with Bergman based on “him not being a very nice guy” despite his achievements as a filmmaker. 

Indeed, while considered one of the most influential directors of all time, Bergman—who died in 2007, at age 89—was raised in an extreme right-wing Swedish family and attended one of Adolf Hitler’s Weimar rallies as a teenager while spending his summer holidays in Germany, sparking an enthusiasm for Nazism that lasted through the war. “Bergman was manipulative,” Skarsgård explained. “He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it when he was manipulating others. He wasn’t nice.”

Elsewhere, Skarsgård defended frequent collaborator Lars von Trier, whose Cannes premiere of “Melancholia” was derailed by provocative comments he made during its press conference; reflecting on his roots, the filmmaker had jokingly called himself “a Nazi” in a wayward aside about Jews and Germans. “Everyone in that room knew he was not a Nazi, that he was the opposite, and yet they all used it as a headline,” explained the actor. “And then people who only read headlines thought he was a Nazi. He just told a bad joke. Lars grew up with a Jewish father, and when his mother was dying, she told him he wasn’t his real father. It was her boss, who was a German.”

Of von Trier’s provocative drama “Breaking the Waves,” starring Emily Watson as a devoutly religious woman whose paralyzed husband urges her to partake in extramarital intercourse, Skarsgård said, “I read it and went: ‘Oh fuck, finally a love story I can relate to.’ It’s about the essence of love. The purity of love.” Helena Bonham Carter was considered for the lead role, but “she didn’t want to be naked with a strange Danish director she didn’t know, and a strange Swedish director she didn’t know,” as Skarsgård bemusedly recalled. They later ran into each other at Cannes, where “Breaking the Waves” won the Palme d’Or, and the actress was understandably rueful at having turned down the role. 

Skarsgård also shared his memories of “Dancer in the Dark,” which similarly won the Palme d’Or along with Cannes’ best-actress prize for Björk, who infamously fell out with von Trier on set. “He didn’t get along with Björk and she didn’t get along with him,” he said. “They were two control freaks, used to getting what they wanted.”

A lighter-hearted highlight in the master-class came when Skarsgård reflected on his recent collaboration with Joachim Trier. “I’ve seen him really see the actors he’s worked with,” the actor said. “He’s become more skilled with each film, and there’s this playfulness that’s very generous.” 

Reflecting on his roles in “Mamma Mia!” and its sequel, the actor recalled a delightful atmosphere on set, particularly for himself and co-stars Sean Connery and Colin Firth: “We were the only three men, and we were bimbos. No background, no anything. We were cute and stupid. I finally understood what they meant when they talk about what women usually experience.”

Skarsgård first arrived in Karlovy Vary on Thursday, where he and festival director Kryštof Mucha addressed hordes of fans outside of the Grandhotel Pupp, with the actor dutifully taking photos and signing autographs (including for one fan wielding a life-size replica of the hammer Mjölnir from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which the actor plays an astrophysicist). 

Later on Friday, Skarsgård returned to the Pupp for roundtable interviews related to his Crystal Globe Award, and RogerEbert.com took a seat to speak with the actor about his long-standing relationship to Czech cinema, the role of empathy in cinema, and some of his most memorable characters and collaborations.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

To start with “Sentimental Value,” tell us about the character of Gustav Borg, this film director and distant father, and how you felt toward him. 

I feel a lot for him because he’s a very flawed man. He’s an old-fashioned man, with all the male roles that entail. He struggles to express his feelings properly, and I feel sorry for him, but I also see that he’s trying. It’s fun to play someone who is trying something so hard and not succeeding; he’s constantly failing with it. Even in the end, he doesn’t succeed even there, but he’s close to something, and he’s close to his daughter, in a way, but you don’t quite know what’ll happen. It’s not a happy ending in this sense. Nothing is solved. It’s still problematic. 

Of course, I’m in the same situation in many ways. I have work that I’m passionate about, but I’m like an addict. Actors or directors, we’re addicts, and we can’t live without our profession, but I have been more successful [than Gustav] in balancing it with my family life. I’ve been home much more, and I’m a more modern man. Pretty early, I made clear to my kids that I’m not good at everything. I’m bad at some things. I’m not on a pedestal up there to be worshipped, as a father. I’m just one of the guys, and that makes it easier. To fail and fail and fail — that is wonderful to play. Of course, in real life, it’s not wonderful. It’s terrible not to succeed, especially when it comes to relationships with people. You try to find a connection, and you can’t. 

Across your career, you’ve played roles in blockbusters and independent films. Does it change your approach to a character, working in mainstream commercial cinema versus working in arthouse cinema?

I approach them in basically the same way. It’s a human being I’m playing. But you have to know what film you’re in, and what’s needed of your character to make the film work. With Baron Harkonnen [in “Dune,”] there’s very little of him, even less than was in the script. I made sure of that because he has only one function, and that is to be fucking frightening. 

And he is, by his visuals. He’s larger than life. He’s weird—this big thing. If you show him a lot in the film, he will shrink. There was an idea from the beginning that he would have no sort of armor, like a villain would in a Marvel film, because that would make him shrink, too. Show him as he is. Show him naked. Show him in pajamas, and he’s frightening. And of course, I’m not interested in showing his background, or that he was misused as a child, or that he has a tragic background. It’s not important. 

In the arthouse, it’s usually about human beings, and you have much more time to describe the person. And you have time to show the contradictions within them. It’s not different, though. You shoot the same way, in some ways. I did “Pirates of the Caribbean” with Gore Verbinski, who is an indie film director and an absurdist. When we worked on that, there were 400 people in the crew, but we were four, five, or more people around the camera, and it was the same as in an indie film. The actors who played in that film enjoyed themselves. 

If you look at my Hollywood films, except for Marvel—which was the first film made by a director I really appreciated, and the others were on a contract—I’ve done most of my films with interesting directors. You want your films to be seen by a lot of people, but you don’t want to sell out, necessarily, and compromise too much. That’s what’s hard.

You’ve worked with many brilliant filmmakers throughout your career. In “Sentimental Value,” playing an acclaimed film director navigating complicated relationships with his actors, what did you draw from the filmmakers you’ve worked with, even, perhaps, in terms of philosophy, regarding the best ways for actors and directors to collaborate?

Of course, I used my experience as an actor to understand how I always want a filmmaker to act. [laughs] In “Sentimental Value,” there is an example of my character’s filmmaking, a short scene from one of his films—it resembles, somehow, the Eastern European films of the ’60s, with very long takes that are expressionistic, in a sense. I liked that. I saw that, and I knew that was a director I could relate to. [laughs] 

To me, as an actor, it’s all in the art form of being creative. It’s the same as a director being creative, a painter being creative, a musician being creative and obsessed by his music, almost to a fault. That I took from my real life into the film. But, as I said before, I did not end up having as bad a relationship with my kids as he had with his—and he had only two kids. [laughs] 

Do you enjoy the presence of obstacles, either emotional or physical, in your filmmaking, as Lars von Trier did within the Dogme 95 movement?

Obstacles are very good for you. They force you to rethink things, to find a new way of approaching the material. Physical obstacles, as well, are very good; if I do several takes in a scene with a chair, I will usually move the chair, so I have to go another way around it, just to do something new and not repeat myself. 

In today’s political climate, do you feel limited in any sense with regard to your self-expression, or see the possibility of offending certain sensibilities as a risk? 

There have been a few years of people being offended, and I think that people have to be offended. Everybody has to be offended. You cannot help that. It’s not good for you not to be offended. You leave too much out of the world if you’re not being offended. I’m afraid it’s something from American culture. You cannot say certain words, you cannot behave in certain ways. I’m getting offended every fucking day by how the world works, and I gotta live with it. 

[What offends me most is] politics in general. My job is to show the child a human being, to show that he’s not in control of his life. He thinks he is, but he’s not. He reacts like a child. And that is pretty obvious; we can see that in the world today. Politicians react with fear, by frightening others, through aggression, the way children do — and they don’t see it. And that’s frightening. I don’t have to mention names when it comes to [that concept of] a president as a child.

I sometimes say things, politically, that are uncomfortable, but I don’t have the illusion that I will change anything by it. What I hope is that you can have a contribution that’s so minuscule, like a breeze that’s simply blowing in the right direction, by showing people the way they are.  

In asking about the roles that have pushed you, either emotionally and physically, one that came to mind was your role in John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin,” especially given the all-time-great car chases in that film. 

It was my first good American role, and it was in a film by John Frankenheimer, who was a legend. I loved it. He was as old as I am now; can you imagine what? [laughs] And he was directing the film as if he were making his first film; he was so enthusiastic. 

What he had, and what that film had that I liked, was the script. I believe it was David Mamet who eventually rewrote the script, and we got a script that was new by him, and there was almost no dialogue in it! That is filmmaking, to me: no dialogue. It was through looks, and everything was understated. Nothing was explained to people. And I loved that. It is fantastic.

Since the ’50s and ’60s, with the French Nouvelle Vogue and the New Wave in Czechoslovakia, for instance, those films took cinema away from what had been filmed theater before, a sort of literary form, where all was explained in the dialogue—like we have in television today, where you’re supposed to to be able to cook at the same time as you watch a television show, so you have to hear what’s going on, or you can’t follow it. But back then, there was a freedom that came with this [movement]. You started to look at human beings between the lines, and you would see that they were lying, that they were telling the truth, that they were in love. Nobody said anything. It was fantastic.

How do you remember working with Miloš Forman on “Goya’s Ghosts,” especially because your character was, as in “Sentimental Value,” an artist under pressure from various directions?

I loved working with him. He was extremely expressive, and he was very much interested in food, and so am I. For instance, he had the idea that, if you cast well, you have done more than half of your job. When Natalie Portman came up to him and said, “Miloš, I have a problem with my role,” he would say, “What?! What’s the matter with you!? I hired you! It’s your job! Where are we eating tonight!?” I understood Miloš, and I liked him.  

Outside of Forman, what has been your relationship to Czech cinema more broadly?

I remember the old Czech films, not only with Miloš but also with Jan Němec, all those wonderful Czech directors. Everybody went to see the Czech films that came out at the time. In Sweden, the students were up to it; they also saw German films, they saw French films, and they saw American films in the ’60s and ’70s. It was a cultural event when it was going on, before the blockbuster era.

But I did not come to Czechoslovakia until it no longer was Czechoslovakia, though I did go to Slovakia, to Bratislava, to shoot a film, and it was the first time I crossed the Iron Curtain. That was sad, because there was very little food in Bratislava at the time. When I came back for the first time, going to get a burger, I was so ashamed.

After the wall came down, I met for the first time Václav Marhoul, then the head of Barrandov Studios. Everything was abandoned at the time, and the people were scrambling to see what they could save of what they had, how they could create a future in this time. And we went out and got very drunk, and he remembers that we had a fight with four drunks that night, and that we won — that we knocked out all four of them. [laughs] I don’t remember that. I think he’s hallucinating, because I can’t imagine myself knocking out somebody, but maybe it did happen. 

I didn’t meet him for another 20 years, until he contacted me because he wanted to make “The Painted Bird,” and I wanted to be a part of it, mainly because I wanted it to get made. There was no role in it for me, though I ended up doing a role without lines that took one day to film. But it took ten years, while I was attached. But we got it made, and I think it’s a wonderful film.

Another memorable role of yours was on television, in “Chernobyl,” portraying Boris Shcherbina, a Soviet apparatchik who is complicit within yet eventually confronts the system that made the nuclear catastrophe possible. 

He’s not interesting to me in the sense that he was a villain. Not all those people were villains. I mean, not even all the Nazis thought they were villains. Many of them thought it was the right thing to do, and they might be right or they might be wrong, but it’s that urge to do good things. Even the MAGA people, most of them think they’re on the right side; of course, they have their information from Fox News and Trump, and that is not reliable information. But on the other hand, in the last ten years, The New York Times hasn’t been reliable either. 

What I wanted to do was to show this man as sympathetic, absolutely believing that he did the right thing, and he was defending a system that he thought was just. And in some ways, it was a just system. It was just ideas, mostly failed ones, that were running it. To see him gradually realizing that we created this catastrophe, with this system, and with him as a pillar of this society, he sees it all crumble in front of his own eyes. And that’s interesting.

I’m representing RogerEbert.com at KVIFF this year; the film critic Roger Ebert famously called the movies “a machine that generates empathy,” and so I was curious in closing to ask you what role empathy plays in great filmmaking, for you, as an actor or an audience member.

I met Roger Ebert once, and I liked him very much. He’s right about empathy, and I think it’s not only film. It’s literature, it’s almost all art. Even if the art doesn’t show empathy, necessarily, in all the colors, it still helps you with it, because it gives you another pair of eyes to see with. You see, with a director’s eyes, his version of reality. And it’s always good to see with somebody else’s eyes, so you don’t get locked into your own bubble, as they say nowadays.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival was held in the Czech Republic from July 4-12, with Skarsgård formally receiving his Crystal Globe during the closing ceremony. “Sentimental Value” will be released Nov. 7 in U.S. theaters via Neon.