Stellan Skarsgård

You should make mistakes because in making mistakes and not being afraid of making mistakes, you're expanding your possibilities and you're expanding the life in the character.

Yeah, enormously.

That in combination with another director, a Swedish director called Bo Weiderberg.

I don't know if you remember him.

He was nominated for a couple of Oscars for foreign films and he won in Cannes a couple of times in the 60s and 70s.

And he said to me, it was about a time when we were going to do a film, he said to me and some other very seasoned Swedish actors, he said, his very special voice and special accent, he said, I know you know how to do this, but I don't want to see your tools.

I want you to be as good as the amateurs that I have in the film.

And that is exactly what Lars von Trier's way of directing or not directing and Joakim Trier's way of not directing is aiming at to get the actors free of their tools, their conventions, they try to do what they think would benefit the career or the film or whatever, just to be there.

And that was a revelation.

It was fantastic.

I mean, he was a very nice man and a very gentle man.

But he also, he had like three brains going on at the same time, wildly.

And he was very funny.

And he was improvising.

He improvised every scene we had to do some extra takes because he had to get his versions out of his system.

But the improvisation was also good for us all.

I mean, you had to follow him wherever he went.

And also he would follow you wherever you went.

And everything became very different from the previous take because of Robin leading it to somewhere that you didn't expect to end up.

But what Gus Van Sant got out of it was he got extremely vivid takes and different temperatures in the takes.