‘Sentimental Value’ Editor Olivier Butte Coutté On Balancing A Multi-Character Film So Every Character “Drives The Film”

After working with Joachim Trier on multiple projects, editor Olivier Butte Coutté was prepared when Trier came to him with the script for Sentimental Value. The real challenge came with piecing together a multi-character film, which was new for both of them.

Sentimental Value follows Nora (Renate Reinsve) and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) as they reunite with their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a film director with a new script he wants Nora for. In the midst of this tense reunion, Gustav meets American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) and decides to cast her for the role. The biggest challenge for the edit was keeping track of all four stories and making sure they all play out in a satisfying way.

DEADLINE: When you got the script and got into doing the edit, what were some of your first ideas for the process?

OLIVIER BUTTE COUTTÉ: I’ve known Joachim since the mid-’90s. We went to film school together and we’ve done six feature films together, short films and commercials. I decided early on in our work relationship not to read the scripts until the very end, until the shooting draft, because these scripts are so complicated with many side stories and characters, and sometimes they montage that tell the story of that character and then you come back to the main story again. So, following that script process over two years up until the shooting draft, when you get to the editor, you’re completely confused.

Joachim started shooting in August and I started editing one week after the shoot, and a week after that he comes to the edit. I do the first version of the film as an assembly for him to see and for me to see as well, as I have a reference of how the script version originally was intended to be. That version came out on this one to be three and a half hours, and the final film is two hours without credits. I think on this one, Joachim didn’t see anything at all until he came to see the edit. He saw the beginning, when I had cut the montage over the city of Oslo with “Dancing Girl”. Then I cut the ending and everything else was a mess. I called up Joachim, put on the FaceTime video and I just showed him like this. He was standing in the gym with people in the back and he said, “Yes, that’s great. Now we have a beginning and the ending. Let’s work on the two hours in between.”

DEADLINE: Were there any sequences or scenes that were particularly challenging to get right for those two hours in between? 

BUTTE COUTTÉ: They’re challenging in different ways. The montages are technically challenging because they have to be entertaining. So, they have to have a certain pace. They have to shift in music, they have to have humor elements that they’re balancing with the voiceover. That also changes a little bit in the edit, so that’s like a little music video that had to work in itself. Then there’s the section in France, which that whole section the first time we cut it was 26 minutes, which was we felt immediately was too long. We couldn’t stay away from Nora’s story for 26 minutes, so intuitively we felt it has to go down by at least 10 minutes. That was challenging in a more dramaturgical kind of way because what is it exactly about that sequence that makes it too long for the film?

The overall challenge of the whole film, I would say, is to balance being a multi-character film with four strong characters. How do you balance those four stories up against each other so you’re still interested in each person, but you don’t tell everything? And we don’t have any suspense or threat underneath that drives the film. We don’t have a terrorist group planning to assassinate the president. We don’t have anything that pulls the film forward. We only have those characters and their struggle.

DEADLINE: It’s really interesting thinking about the film as a multi-character story. It seems like it would be a very difficult challenge to balance every character.

BUTTE COUTTÉ: Yes, I mean that’s the struggle in that film. It’s the first time that we made a film that is a multi-character film, because up until then we’ve only had one protagonist and then some strong side characters, like the previous one, The Worst Person in the World. That’s one main protagonist and what she goes through, but this one is completely different.

For me, there was also a big revelation to try to work on a multi-character film in that sense. I take it as a film boot camp and now I’m muscled up for the next film. Just bring it on.