Video: ‘The worst person in the world’ | Anatomy of a scene

My name is Joachim Trier and I am the co-writer and director of The Worst Person in the World. In this scene, we see the main character in the film, Julie, played by Renate Reinsve, and she is with her slightly older boyfriend Aksel. And she is very curious to explore this other relationship with a man named Eivind romantically. So what we’re experimenting with in the scene is, what would happen if she could stop time and walk away from her current relationship and try to have a moment to herself with the other guy? I didn’t want the series to be such a slick CGI, perfect thing. I wanted it to have a human feel. I wanted it to feel more like an old-school musical or something. So what we did was we asked people near Oslo to stand still, while we let Julie run past them and run through the streets and different places that we had chosen. So most of the people you see are extras who have been hired. And they got the idea that, can you almost stand like you’re running? Or can you stand like that? So they all had an idea on set. And we’ve had prep days, and I had a great team of people to help me arrange the choreography of it, rather, this frozen choreography of the sequence. But something beautiful happened towards the end of this sequence that she runs down a street and we just follow her, and we suddenly realized that people were joining in. People looked out their windows and realized what we were doing from their apartments or something. And so a few people had run out onto the street and stiffened up in new positions just to add on the second or third take. So it almost became a party feeling. And mind you, we did this after the first wave of COVID. So I think there was an added joy, both for the film team and for the people who were part of it, to get together in such a big crowd again. It was actually some really nice days on set doing this. [MUSIC PLAYING]