Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you're listening to Episode 724 of Script Notes.

It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you best introduce your characters and their world to the audience?

We'll discuss with an expert on the topic.

Yolkim Trier is a writer and director whose credits include Latter bombs, Worst Person in the World, and this year's Sentimental Value, which is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for him and his co-writer, Escovote. Welcome, Yolkim. Thank you. Hi. Good to see you. It's great to have you here.

I loved your movie. I'm so happy it got this amazing reception. It is just a terrific film.

I want to talk about how it came to be, but I specifically want to focus on how you introduce the audience to both the world and to the characters.

So I thought that was when I knew I was in really good hands.

Like the opening sequence is brilliant.

How we meet with Nora is so, so good.

When you've stuck your claws into us that well, we're going to follow you on your story.

And it's just masterfully done.

Thank you so much.

That's a big compliment coming from you.

So thank you.

Yeah, no, I'd love to talk screenwriting.

I've collaborated for, you know, all the six feature films.

There's short films before that with Eskilfogtz as a co-writer.

And I find that we are drawn to, on one hand, of course, wanting to do movies in a tradition of clarity of

storytelling and all that, but more than anything, we are interested in the ambiguity of character.

We are interested in building stuff around the psychological mechanisms and the yearnings of people.

And that's kind of where the energy comes from when we start writing a lot. Yeah, so I definitely want to focus in on that initial part of the process. We'll also answer some listener questions that were relevant to your film. And in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about screenplays on screen because we have a screenwriter in this movie. Stellen Scaryscar plays a writer. And the printed scripts we see in the movie are different than what I expect. And so I want to talk about sort of like how we depict screenplays and screenwriting in movies. Because it's a thing that actually weirdly comes up a lot in movies because writers are often writing about writing. But I want to talk about the choices you made and sort of maybe some things that I'm expecting as an American screenwriter that are just different than what you're expecting as a European screenwriter.

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