A profoundly moving portrait of a family reckoning with the painful memories embedded deep within the walls of their ancestral home, Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” finds the filmmaker reflecting once more on the existential themes—of time, love, identity, and history—that have abounded throughout his career.

The film reunites Trier with Renate Reinsve, a Norwegian actress whose performance in “The Worst Person in the World” earned her the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival; as a theater actress revisiting old wounds, her performance—opposite that of Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as her younger sister—distills the kind of agonized emotional clarity that has governed Trier’s recent work. 

Stellan Skarsgård stars as Gustav Borg, their father and a once-celebrated filmmaker whose efforts to repair his relationship with his two daughters are complicated by his interest in revisiting his own, fraught familial experience—including the suicide of his mother, who suffered during World War II under Nazi occupation, and whose lingering loss factors into this recent work. For Trier, the film is personal; his maternal grandfather, Erik Løchen, was one of Norway’s better-known filmmakers, as well as a jazz musician. During WWII, he was in the resistance and was captured, spending time in work camps and barely surviving; though that trauma lingered throughout his life, Trier believes his grandfather made films in part to process his pain. His presence is indirectly felt in “Sentimental Value” through the voiceover narration of Bente Børsum, who appeared in Løchen’s “The Hunt.”

Ahead of “Sentimental Value” opening in theaters, Trier sat down for a wide-ranging discussion of his film’s poignant themes, the challenges and joys of working with time, his unique personal connection to this story, the inescapable influence of Ingmar Bergman, and much more. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I’ve always felt that you identify so strongly with your characters—that the empathy of your filmmaking flows from your impulse to understand and connect with them. You come from a film family, and I’m curious about drawing on that personal experience in shaping the characters of Gustav Borg, his daughters, and Rachel Kemp. 

It’s true. I think the idea of identification comes first from a writer’s point of view, then from a director’s, and finally from a collaboration with the actors. I need to understand them and identify their yearnings and their struggles. But that’s not the same as saying that the characters are biographically like me, or that you don’t need to vary up the characters. Still, this is a polyphonic kind of story, and so it’s nice to have that identification. 

For example, Gustav is a film director. As you say, absolutely correctly, I come from a film family background. Without him being anyone I know, I understand the struggles and the joys, the passion for making films, so I identify with that—and also the anxiety, perhaps, that it will come to an end, that “one day they won’t let me,” which is what he’s going through. But this film was also about having characters like the younger sister, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who was in Gustav’s film as a child and certainly didn’t want to be in front of the camera again—something completely different. 

With her, for example, I found this identifiable point: she wants everyone to connect and feel good. I have that in me. I always want people to get along. You do find something with all of them, after a while, when working on them. But the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t want to hinder the possibility of the actors coming in and taking charge of the characters. It’s good to leave an open space for them to fill in, as well.

The term you use, “polyphonic,” refers specifically to sound. I’m curious about your creative relationship to music, score, and especially sound design, as this was your father’s craft. Your film opens and closes with two wonderful tracks, Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” and Labi Siffre’s “Cassock Chase,” but how do you think about the role of sound design in your filmmaking?

Thank you very much for asking that. I really care about it. When I talk to friends about using music in film, I also tell them that one of the joys of life is the system of loudspeakers and the richness of frequency you get in a good cinema. It’s the best sound you’ll hear anywhere in the world. It’s a super hi-fi, complex, surround-sound experience. I feel that sometimes filmmakers forget how subtle you can be while still including a lot of sound and using the full range of frequencies. Hammering, loud sound doesn’t necessarily use the possibilities of a theater.

That’s something I think I’ve learned from my father: that you can create what feels like silence but is actually a full sound design of atmospheric subtlety. I love loud pieces of music; I love noise, but I also love the dynamics of daring to be quiet and gentle with sound. It’s almost like you draw the audience into the image by being very cautious about sound in certain areas.

For example, towards the end, there’s an almost climactic scene between the two sisters, full of emotion and action. And there’s no music. I tried to really build towards that feeling of presence: being there, hearing the breathing, all the movements of clothes. That can ultimately be so strong. Sometimes, when it comes to people talking about sound, they always talk about the loud films—And I think that the opposite could be equally complex and interesting.

Everyone has a childhood home, a place where they grew up; this film explores the poetics of such a location. You’ve referred to the house as a “witness of the unspoken.” But there’s an emotional residue in the house’s atmosphere; it reflects all this lived experience. What can you say about first conceiving of the house and its presence, and of mapping your story onto this setting once you had a physical location?

First of all, our spatial treatment of the narrative—to refine it so that it fit the space—was an exciting, visual task. When we write, Eskil Vogt and I write for the image in a way, and for the actors, but I think the sound aspect is really interesting as well. 

Hania Rani was our wonderful composer; this was the first collaboration I’ve had with her. She wanted to go to the house and record its reverb and other sonic qualities, which, to me, was fascinating. I’ve never had anyone think like that, but she said it inspired and affected her approach to reverbs for certain pieces of music as well. The idea of sound always being present is very interesting to me.

And to elaborate on that spatial treatment of the narrative, this film required characters to move between rooms and down corridors, and it needed a location with a room that could be dressed to play different roles over time. We first see Nora enter the house through what had been her mother’s psychology office, where there’s still an empty chair… How much did the story change once you had a location, and how much did the narrative dictate the location you were looking for?

It was a bit of both. The first draft contained pretty much the story you see in the film, but the relationship between the upstairs and downstairs—and that hallway corridor towards the room where such dramatic events we realize throughout the story had occurred, all of that repetition of angles that is so fun to play with in movies—I think this house really gave itself to that. Along with our wonderful production designer, Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, we also built a replica of the house. In addition to shooting in the real house, we had a studio version so we could go between them. 

The studio version got dressed for every 10 years of the 20th century, with different wallpapers and different moods. A lot of that was done through research; we also had in the studio these VP walls—virtual production walls—where we created an exterior, based on research, photo-realistically showing how foliage grew over time and how buildings were erected suddenly as others disappeared. We drew a map of time through the house and its surroundings.

You actually built a replica of the Borg family house on a soundstage to film a montage of the house across generations. What effect did that have for you, given the relevance of that filmmaking technique to the story? Gustav is so fixated on filming this deeply personal story in the actual house where so much has happened. 

I’m primarily a location director, so I always feel it’s wonderful to look out the window and receive a gift, as something will happen that makes it feel close to life. But, actually, with the team we had, the studio experience was wonderful, as was the feeling of being able to create specific moods with a lot of control. So, control and chaos were both alive in this process, in new and unusual ways for me.

The replica house made me think about how directly you depict time in this film. How has your temperament toward dealing with time, which you’ve described as one of the primary aesthetic considerations a filmmaker can have, evolved with this film?

It’s such a great question, and it’s an essential one to the core of this story. The aspect of time begins with the film’s opening, which shows Nora, the eldest daughter, and her essay on the house’s perception of her family history. It’s the idea that, for the house, a human life is very short, because the house is a constant, in a way; it’s this longer, lasting structure. I thought that was a nice setup for a story about reconciliation, where the adult realization of the sisters that they’re not going to have their father around forever—even though he’s a complicated character—means they, in their own individual ways, have to reconcile their relationship with him. 

That’s one aspect, but it’s also a possibility to put the idea of social history into context when we realize through the film that the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Norway were affecting the lives of families, and many people’s lives, in ways that still impact us. Many people say that a war trauma takes three generations before it lets go. For people who haven’t seen the film yet, that’s not in the forefront of the story, but it’s there in the house, and the idea of the house witnessing life helps us tell that story.

It’s Agnes who seeks out more knowledge about her grandmother’s experiences during the war, and this has a profound effect on her. It’s my understanding you’ve personally been through that process of tracing your family history back into that conflict.

My grandfather was in the resistance during the war; he was captured and spent time imprisoned by the Nazis across two different camps, and he was very traumatized by that. He made films after the war, and I think that was a way to survive and find a place in the world again. He was creating something and seeking meaning in it. 

I think that’s at the core of the process of making this film for me, but also the idea of the National Archive, the accounting of facts in a society, is fundamental. It’s a different narrative from the fictional one of the National Theater, where the older sister works; it’s the historical aspect of how necessary it is for democracy and society to hold themselves accountable to facts. 

I found, through a piece of paper, a witness to the accounts of my grandfather’s imprisonment. It’s provable. No one can deny there’s proof that a terrible thing happened to him. With where the world is right now, that’s a very important thing to remember: that we need to learn from history. And I think the film asks this question of the ambivalence of history and memory. On one level, we need to forget, to forgive a difficult parent.

On the other hand, we owe it to the past to remember certain things, not to repeat those faults. And we owe it to the people who experienced certain things. That’s the space where we live in time, in between those two notions.

It’s better to live in impermanence than in any kind of finality, in how we reconcile with the past.

Life is a process—and making films is a process. Now that I have talked a bit about this film, and you’re asking me about memory and time and our relation to it—and also the process of making a film—there’s always that retrospective narrative that now is slowly being created as I’m talking to journalists. 

But it’s a narrative that will never quite mirror the process, because in making it, you’re lost along the way. You think it’s about something, then you discover something else. It’s ongoing, but it’s nice, at the end, to try to summarize: “What the hell did we make?” and to meet people who can mirror it back to us.

To bring Gustav into that theme of excavating memory… Nora works within the theater, and Agnes explores the archives. As we see in Deauville, during a retrospective of his work, Gustav has been speaking through his art, making films like the one whose ending we see: a wartime drama about an orphan’s ordeal. What is he reckoning with? 

“Anna,” yes. We thought a lot about that, actually, since we knew that Gustav is a character who’s quite clumsy at relating to people socially, particularly his family and his daughters, but whom we realize has a more sophisticated, emotionally engaging way to create art. It was very important that those films expressed some aspect of him; in the piece of his film we see, though more pieces didn’t make it into the final cut, the ending of “Anna” obviously deals with some sense of survivor’s guilt. 

We later realize perhaps why that is a major theme with him. It was important for us to use everything in this film to get into character and to explain the layers of observation about human beings’ incapacity for communication, while still revealing them. That was an interesting way into him, the films.

Gustav speaks through his art in a way that he cannot in life; with the film he wants to make, it’s about his mother and his daughter, but it’s also about him. He’s trying to express something deeply personal by speaking through them. But one wonders whether he wrote this script specifically to bring about personal reconciliation, or whether he wrote it to revitalize his career because he knew it would be creatively stimulating. 

My feeling is that you have a really great understanding of the complexity of that in your question, and I’m almost hesitant to answer, because I think you’ve put it very beautifully. There are a lot of different things going on with him, I think you’re right. It’s interesting for the audience to consider whether Gustav’s primary urge is reconciliation. Does he want to do something with his daughter? Or is it primarily just wanting to make a film? Or is it mainly to resolve his relationship with his mother and the trauma around her death? Or is it everything, and he’s confused, and he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t quite have to know, because at the end of the day, he knows how to craft a movie, and that’s what he does? All of those things could be playing out at different levels of his psyche at the same time or at different times.

Tell me about your relationship with both Eskil Vogt, your co-writer, and Olivier Bugge Coutté, your editor. You’re long-time collaborators. How do you work together? 

Those two are people I’ve worked with since my short films and have made all six features with. I think Eskil is a starting point, then he leaves the project for a while, and I go and direct it—he’s not very involved at that point—and then, halfway through the edit, Olivier and I feel we have reached a place where we need feedback, so we show it to Eskil, and he comes back in. We sometimes have terrible arguments, but we always end up friends, all of us.

Olivier is all about what is actually at play in the material, and what the best version is now, while Eskil sometimes reminds us of the thematic complexities we shouldn’t lose. I’m the director in the middle, trying to listen as skillfully as I can to these smart people, to try to get it to land in the right place. It’s one of the most exciting things to have collaborators you’ve worked with for a long time. You have shorthand, so you can go deep quickly and get into the core of the challenges every new film will automatically present. It’s tricky making films and getting the balance right. That’s the art of it.

To the point, I felt your use of close-ups on your actors’ faces was beautifully balanced in this film. I know that’s been a fascination of yours through your career—and I love this film’s reference to “The Piano Teacher,” a film featuring one of the most unforgettable close-up shots: at the end, her with the knife. What’s the secret to maintaining that kind of proximity with actors, and what’s your process of knowing when you’ve found what you’re looking for in an actor’s expression?

I sit next to the camera and have a handheld monitor to check the frame, but I look at them with my eyes and try to feel what’s going on. That’s the best way of judging it. There is a very inspiring clip of Ingmar Bergman on set for one of his last films, in which an actor questions whether they got it right. And Bergman says something along the lines of, “Well, I felt it, and I don’t squander emotions with you guys. Let’s move on. I’m sure we could do a million other great versions, but I felt it now, so I’m done with this. Let’s move on.” 

At the end of the day, we try a lot of variations, but if I feel that we’ve explored it properly, it’s not a rational thing. You’ve got to trust your gut and say to the actor, “I’m really pleased with this. Thank you. You gave me a lot of your experience of the scene. Let’s move on.” And that’s the art again: when do you call it? There’s a programmatic side to it, of course, having limited time and all that. But I felt that, in this one, we got to explore the material at hand deeply. I’m very grateful and happy for that.

I’m glad you brought up Bergman. One film I sense reflecting into this one, and not just because of the family Borg, is “Wild Strawberries.” I’m curious about how film influences you. But to frame that question more expansively, “Sentimental Value” is narrated by the Norwegian actress Bente Børsum, now 93, who worked with your grandfather on “The Hunt.” How did you think, with this film, about working with both your own family’s history and this larger lineage of Scandinavian cinema?

There are a lot of interesting things to talk about there. I’ll start with Bente, and then go to Bergman. Yes, Bente played the lead in my grandfather’s 1960 film, “The Hunt”; both were very young. It was her first lead role. It was his first film.

Long story short, I actually have a gym close to my house where there are a lot of old people present—a physiotherapy center, really—where it’s cheap to go and work out. And I went there and suddenly felt very young amongst all the old people; suddenly, I realized that Bente Børsum was there. I’d just met her briefly, but we got to know each other. We met there on Sundays, sometimes during our workouts/ I thought, “What a magnificent chance to work with her.” I never really had a part I could offer, but I could do the narration, and it suddenly clicked that she knew my grandfather.

She also has this beautiful narration about Agnes going to the National Archive, which you and I spoke about earlier, and she could talk about those things with great authority, as her mother was captured during the war. I know that’s a very dear theme to her: the grief and woundedness of the war, even though it was so long ago, she still carries that. That was a really wonderful thing, to have a little homage back to my grandfather’s first film.

When it comes to Bergman, I am very happy you brought up “Wild Strawberries.” That’s such a gentle yet deeply melancholic film about an old man asking questions of whether he lived the life he was supposed to. Did he connect, or why didn’t he connect with certain people? I think that’s very relevant to Gustav’s story. 

It’s hard to talk about Bergman because he’s at play in so many indirect and unconscious ways for me, I’m sure. It’s always a problem when I say at home that Bergman inspires me; everyone wants to take me down a notch. “Oh, you’re not Bergman. He was much greater.” I’ve had a couple of asshole critics who are, like, “Oh, he thinks he’s Bergman.” I never thought I was anything. Ozu from Japan inspires me, as do many American filmmakers, as well as Bergman. 

It’s just the ongoing process of being a film lover and seeing what film is capable of, trying to take that energy and bring it somewhere else. I think that’s unavoidable—because I’m Scandinavian, everyone thinks it’s Bergman, and that’s not a lie, but it’s so many other things as well, is my point. [laughs]

“Sentimental Value” is now playing in select theaters, via Neon. 

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.