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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 Pierce Brosnan 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.
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