I wanted dreams to feel as serious to the dreamers as to the audience: Kristoffer Borgli on Dream Scenario

How did the idea of Dream Scenario come up and become a feature film?

There were many elements in the beginning. The first thing was the character Paul Matthews, a middle-aged academic who felt entitled to recognition as an academic for a work that he had not even written. That I found comedic. I liked the character I had in mind but I didn’t have a story. I found Carl Jung’s collective unconscious theory interesting. I thought of these high-concept movies such as A Nightmare at Elm Street (1984). I thought it would be funny to take a high-concept core idea and place it in a different genre — social satire or character portrait.

When did Nicholas Cage come on board as the protagonist?

After I set the movie up with my producers, Lars Knudsen and Ari Aster, they made it possible for A24 (an American production company) to fund it. Later, we considered the names who would be part of it. Once we thought of Nicholas Cage, it was obvious to me that he might be the most suited person to play the part of Paul, not just for his acting talent but because he has become sort of a mythical icon in our culture already.

A still from the movie Dream Scenario.

You are the writer, editor and director of Dream Scenario. How intense was the process of making it?

The writing and editing parts are not so intense. These are lonely processes when I gather my thoughts. While shooting a movie, you are very social and you are with dozens of people every day, collaborating and discussing under high pressure. It is good for me; a balance between two different worlds. I don’t purely want
to write or be on the sets. I like to combine them.

Creating the dream sequences, some of them are quite bizarre, must have been challenging.

The problem of dreams is that they are uninteresting to other people. The reason is that our language is limited when it comes to communicating what a dream feels like. When you are dreaming, your scepticism is turned off. Everything that you dream of, you take it seriously. When you are awake and reflect on it, it feels ridiculous. While making the film, we were not just using language to explain it, we were taking a camera inside the dream. So, it is no longer a story, it’s an experience. I wanted these dreams to feel as serious to the dreamers as to the audience.

Your previous feature, Sick of Myself (2022), too is a commentary on contemporary society. So is Dream Scenario, which talks about social media and cancel culture.

I wanted the movie to be a realistic evolution of a story set in our culture. I was looking at what happens with people who suddenly become famous. I was guided by what is happening in our culture. With the attention and love for something, comes capitalism, marketing and advertising as they want to piggyback on these big phenomena. It was interesting to look at them through a character (Paul) who was not well-equipped to deal with this culture. He is not aware of all the possible mistakes that one can make or how to engage with public consciousness or mass culture.

Will your future projects too have surrealistic elements?

I am still unsure what I would do in the future. I just follow my creative instincts and intuition. You will probably recognise a tone or voice in everything that I do.