One of the things that really fascinates me about movies is that they make seemingly ordinary moments be filled with some curiosity or some energy or some mystery.

We don't usually start out with a plot that we can pitch in two lines. We spend a year brainstorming and discussing ideas that are sometimes of a visual nature, sometimes just about characters and then we try to structure the story.

Oslo is a city with a hidden beauty that I wanted to explore and find out if it was possible to capture the specific feeling of bicycling home from a party early in the morning just as the sun is coming up.

One of the things that really fascinates me about movies is that they make seemingly ordinary moments be filled with some curiosity or some energy or some mystery.

I think that cinema is a great place to make stories of loneliness. And being Norwegian, I don't want to make the film about loneliness in being out in nature on a mountaintop; it's about being in the cities.

I don't want to make a depressing movie. I want it to allow us to ask some questions and stay asking those questions. How predetermined are our lives? It's something I don't have the answer to.

Cinema is a wonderful art form for talking about loneliness. We can experience films together with other people. It can be a collective experience of loneliness. We're alone in the dark of the theater, but with other people.