Lars Von Trier - Interview

Interview, Oct, 2000 by Guy Flatley

FILM'S MOST DARING DIRECTOR DELIVERS AGAIN

Like his fellow rebels in the Dogma 95 movement, Lars von Trier, director of the controversial Dancer in the Dark, prefers his movies raw. Handheld cameras. Natural light. Improvised dialogue. No studio sets, makeup, costumes, theme music, or special effects. This might be as boring as it sounds, were it not for the emotional and visual power Von Trier brings to his turbulent tales of innocents stumbling through an evil universe. He's like a purist of the silent screen risen from the dead to shoot porn--a Griffith gone gonzo.

In Breaking the Waves--the stunning drama that put the Danish writer-director on the international movie map in 1996--a woman (played by Emily Watson) achieves kinky sainthood by obeying the command of her macho but paralyzed husband to copulate with strangers and then confide to him the intimate details of her lewd encounters. Next, in 1998's The Idiots, Von Trier thrilled some and repulsed others with his depiction of a band of depraved pranksters who-when they aren't amusing themselves in restaurants and on street corners by pretending to be dribbling, dangerous retards--can be found back at their comfy commune, exploiting a woman whose son has recently died or indulging in carefree gang bangs.

How can the forty-four-year-old maverick possibly top these shocks? The answer is to be found in Dancer in the Dark, the final entry in his trilogy dealing with sacrificial female victims. This hauntingly beautiful and brutal hybrid stars Icelandic pop singer Bjork as Selma, an immigrant factory worker who has come to America to earn the money for an operation that will save her son from blindness. Laced with cruelty, violence, and startling song-and-dance numbers, the movie saves its biggest shock for the final scene, set in a death chamber deep in redneck country. Some members of the audience at the Cannes Festival were so shaken they could scarcely pull themselves together when the lights came up; others, more surly than shaken, actually booed when the jury named Bjork Best Actress and awarded the Golden Palm to the film, which they considered an unsavory anti-American smorgasbord. Scheduled to premiere soon in major cities around the world, the polarizing musical drama recently opened the New York Film F estival--an event skipped by the filmmaker because of his acute fear of flying. So he chatted with me by phone from Copenhagen, where he lives with his wife and four children.

GUY FLATLEY: Some people feel that Dancer in the Dark is anti-American because you show an innocent immigrant being first brutally mistreated by a police officer, and then falsely charged with murder, tried without a word of defense from her court-appointed lawyer, and eventually sentenced to die. How do you respond to that accusation?

LARS VON TRIER: Well, first of all, I'm quite sure my depiction of the American judicial system is very unfair. In a real lawsuit you would hear both sides, but we have cut out what was not important for the story. I have never been to America, so to describe America in a documentary way I would never dare. For me America is something that exists in the cinema--90 percent of the films that we see in Denmark are American. So my lack of knowledge about America is because I've seen the wrong films. You know, Casablanca [1942] wasn't about Casablanca. It's the same with Dancer in the Dark. The story is taking place in a fictional America.

GF: Couldn't you have set the story in another country?

LVT: As a young man I was very fond of musicals, and for me, musicals--especially film musicals--are connected with the United States. So it was an important part of the story that Selma, a young woman who loved musicals so much, would come to the mother- or fatherland of musicals.

GF: In your movie, Selma is seen rehearsing for an amateur production of The Sound of Music. Did you discuss Rodgers and Hammerstein much with Bjork?

LVT: Yes. Bjork had seen The Sound of Music thirty times--not because she wanted to, but because it played every weekend in Iceland, and her parents took her to see it.

GF: Did she like it at all?

LVT: Well, if you saw The Sound of Music thirty times without wanting to...

GF: I'd jump off a mountain.

LVT: Yes. But it's very good music, and Bjork agrees that it's good.

GF: You also agreed that the music she composed for the film is good, but I've heard you didn't agree about much else. It's been reported that you were so outraged by her unprofessional conduct that you broke two television sets and that Bjork walked off the set, returning four days later with a lawyer who tried to break her contract. Do you think you'll ever work with her again?

LVT: I don't think I'm going to work with her again, but I am going to see her very soon. We're trying to do something--not a movie, but a behind-the-camera sort of thing. Let's see if it works. I think we can see each other now that we're not playing a power game anymore. This whole thing became so extremely emotional for both of us. She's used to working with no guidance, so she can do whatever she wants, follow any inspiration she gets. But on a film somebody has to keep her under control, in the sense that she has to follow the story and everything else that's going on. It was so painful for her because she literally became Selma--she was not acting. Bjork is definitely not an actor. She was a dying person, and I became more or less the hangman. In the end, I would say that I was probably an asshole. I just wanted the film to be finished and to survive.