Many of your films with director Joachim Trier also focus on the experiences of youth, especially the darkness or difficulties of youth – suicide, unrequited love, family death, loneliness, drug addiction. But from your first film, Blindthen your collaboration Thelma, you’ve turned to more fantasy or horror motifs to explore many of these same themes. Was there a reason for this change?

When we started, Joachim and I thought we would make very stylized films. But when we started creating them, we discovered that we were much more interested in people, characters, and psychology than we thought. So all of a sudden we were into this side of filmmaking, writing characters that looked like or were composites of people we knew and ourselves. We explored these questions in a very humanistic way. And then with Thelma we thought, What if we tried to do something more inherently visual? He and I are big fans of genre films. With Blind, I wanted to access a character’s thoughts, so it went wild and free because that character has a wild imagination. So it’s more about how to access a character, get people to understand a character, get people to change their perspective on a character. I like that in a story. And I come back to it in a different way in almost everything I write.

Likewise, with both Thelma and Innocents there is the appearance of the countryside or the pastoral, which is often associated with childhood and which is another element of the traditional fairy tale. Did this change of setting play an important role in your evolution towards the supernatural?

It’s very interesting. I did a Q&A in Norway with a professor from the university there who published a book on Norwegian horror films. He said that in all the supernatural and horror films in Norway, you head out into nature and that’s where the scary things happen. I think we did something like this in Thelma and Innocents, where we shifted our focus from central Oslo to east Oslo, at the edge of the forest, so you can feel a kind of fairy tale magic from the trees. I lived for a few years when I was young in a place that was quite similar to where we were filming Innocents, with these huge apartment buildings. You walk out and there are still some adults walking around who might see you, but then you can walk 30 meters uphill into the forest and you’re completely on your own. You can do what you want. You can be with your friends, you can play games, you can experiment, you can transgress – no one is watching. I thought that contrast was so interesting for the themes of my film. We found this amazing place on the outskirts of Oslo, which had an even bigger forest than the one I lived near when I was a kid. It makes it look like a fairy tale even though it’s a real place, with that kind of diverse community. Thus, the setting became very important for the film.