Quotes of the Day
Lars von Trier is the first to admit that he has a high opinion of himself. "I believe I am Superman," he says. But as the Danish director hurtles across the parking lot of his production complex outside Copenhagen, you don't think, "It's a bird, it's a plane ..." Instead you think, "He's driving a camouflage-painted golf cart." And steering around imaginary Kryptonite — for a time, Von Trier was a recluse, paralyzed by a fear of going out in public. Unusually for a superhero, he is also afraid to fly. So when he sets off for the Cannes Film Festival this week, he'll bundle his mad genius, his pop CDs and his good friend Carsten into his camper for the 21/2-day drive to the French Riviera.
If there is one thing Lars von Trier does not fear, it is making a cinematic statement. His latest, Dogville, premieres at Cannes on May 19, and he hopes the dark tale of a woman seeking refuge in a small Rocky Mountain town will spark conversation and even controversy. "Films should provoke mental activity," he says. "That's what keeps an audience alive." And what keeps his camera rolling. At 47, after six boldly experimental features, he has already garnered more hosannas from critics and actors than most directors get in a career. Nicole Kidman, who plays the runaway in Dogville, says Von Trier is "so ahead of his time." He has won prizes, including a Golden Palm at Cannes in 2000 for Dancer in the Dark, his sad, dreamy, melodramatic musical starring Björk. With fellow Dane Thomas Vinterberg, he even started a wave, Dogme, which called for filmmaking to be stripped of special effects and other distracting extras, and inspired a small army of less talented Dogmetists. But Von Trier moved on; he still has so many questions to ask. "I was always the weakest boy in the class, and I was always being beaten like hell by the other kids," he recalls, "but I was loud. I could speak." Now that he has found his platform, there's no way he's going to shut up.
What he says often seems twisted. Stellan Skarsgård, who starred opposite Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves (1996) and has now returned for Dogville, theorizes that Von Trier is a "disturbed child playing with a dollhouse, who snaps the heads off all the dolls." So while many critics praised Dancer in the Dark, and a few noted the historic moment when Catherine Deneuve barks like a bichon frise, others questioned the plausibility of Von Trier's America. Was there ever, they mused, a machine operator with skin so glowing, a headscarf so Hermès and an accent so glamorous as Deneuve? Von Trier's reply: get over it. "I see Bruce Willis running around in his movies, and I have a problem with how that relates to the real world," he says. His films "are not the truth. It's the image in my head. My information may be correct or not correct — that's not the point."
Dogville is set entirely in the Rockies, for instance, but Von Trier has never been anywhere near there. "I've never been to America, but there's an impression," he says. "Americans sometimes forget what they represent in the world." To remind them, he decided to make not one film, but three, a trilogy he calls U.S.A. "Dogville is U," he says, an impish grin creeping across his stubbled face. "I was provoked." Plausible or not, Dogville is about Grace (Kidman), who is on the run from gangsters and whose porcelain skin suggests that even Depression-era fugitives have time to moisturize. Dogville's residents, prodded by a struggling writer and self-appointed town spokesman named Tom (Paul Bettany), agree to give Grace shelter and work. But the haven is not so safe, and the work, which starts off as tending gooseberry bushes behind Ma Ginger's (Lauren Bacall) general store, ends up being in beds and the backs of trucks. Add secrets and betrayal, and you have a Von Trier parable on society. "I'm not criticizing. I'm raising human problems," he says. "Dogville is in America, but it could be anywhere. A fugitive comes to the community. What happens then?"
The idea of the outsider, the most consistent theme in his films, has been on his mind since his youth. The son of socialist nudists, Lars Trier grew up an activist, and at 12, he sped to afterschool Vietnam War protests on his bike. As an adult, he started learning more about who he was — and wanted to be. During film school, he added the snooty "von" — because it looked nice — despite being a communist. He converted to Catholicism. He became a feature filmmaker, beginning in the 1980s with two little-seen movies, The Element of Crime and Epidemic. "He was regarded as O.K., with a talent for imagemaking," says Peter Aalbæk Jensen, his business partner. "But he was well-known as a total pain in the ass to work with." The lessons kept coming: he found out from his mother just before her death that the man who raised him wasn't his biological father. Reclusive and phobic, he started taking Prozac. Says Aalbæk Jensen: "I've always been thankful to the medicine industry for what they did to him."
After Europa won two prizes at Cannes in 1991, he and Aalbæk Jensen started Zentropa, the film company now at the heart of Danish cinema. In 1994, Von Trier made The Kingdom, a nightmarish Danish TV miniseries that gained an international cult following. But his first real global mark came in 1995, when he and Vinterberg penned the Dogme Vow of Chastity, the influential 10 Commandments of minimalist filmmaking that included rules such as "The camera must be handheld" and inspired a wave of pared-down films. Von Trier was never very Dogmetic himself. He only made one film, The Idiots (1998), by the rules. "It's not so much that the rules are brilliant. They're not. But you can gain something from limitations." Elements of the style did creep into his most celebrated movies: Breaking the Waves, the story of a devout woman who has sex with other men believing it will cure her paralyzed husband; and Dancer in the Dark.
Von Trier's fame has won him a platform for political activism. Before the 2001 Danish general elections, he bought full-page newspaper ads urging voters to shun the far-right, anti-immigrant Danish People's Party. He has pushed, so far unsuccessfully, for Denmark to adopt the euro. And he has criticized the Iraq war, which the Danish government backed. "I feel for America," he says. "They have to do something about their image."
But it is on film, not in politics, where you'll find the essence of Von Trier. The Idiots, about an occasionally nudist commune of left-leaning Danes who pretend to be mentally disabled, "was my most personal film," he says. "It built on my culture, my parents, my upbringing." But you'll find bits of him in every film. "The way I write characters is to split myself and give to all of them," he says. In Dogville, the naive Tom "is who I am," and the caring, misunderstood Grace "is who I want to be." Then there's the music, a supporting actor in most of his films. Dogville sneaks in Young Americans by David Bowie — "a god," says Von Trier. The eclectic Dane loves "pure pop" and Garth Brooks, too, but will also direct Wagner's Ring cycle in Bayreuth in 2006.
"He's always trying new things," says Dogville producer Vibeke Windeløv. "He's always very sure of what he wants in his art." What he wanted for Dogville was a sparsely furnished, stage-like 1,600-sq-m set in tiny Trollhättan, Sweden. Cast and crew lived, ate, partied together. Almost everyone was on set, in character, all day, every day. "All for one, one for all," says Siobhan Fallon Hogan, who plays Martha. "Even the biggest stars essentially did extras' work — we were all always in the background."
Pushing Hollywood icons like Kidman, Bacall and James Caan to play along gives Dogville its acting-troupe feel. But it probably didn't help Von Trier's reputation for being demanding — especially after Dancer in the Dark, during which he and Björk famously fought over creative control. Kidman recalls: "Everyone said to me, 'Why are you going off to do this thing with this cruel director?'" Cruel is the wrong word — but even his most loving collaborators call him "arrogant," "obnoxious" and "brutally honest," and he confesses his own stubbornness.
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Von Trier is typically blunt about the fate of Dogville (the town, not the movie): "They're going to hell." And the actors lived it. Bettany said at one point that he felt like "driving a railway spike through my head." Working with Von Trier "can be painful," says Skarsgård, who plays a town resident named Chuck. "If you want to portray a character a certain way — your way — you'll be f____d." Trust is key; the actor may feel out of control, but Von Trier knows where he's going. Skarsgård recalls a scene where Chuck rapes Grace. "After a couple of takes, Lars said, 'Stellan, don't you think you could play this as a romantic comedy?' Of course the whole thing didn't work, but there were moments that did work, that he did use."
"At first I would cry because he would chastise me," says Kidman, who credits long walks in the woods with Von Trier for their "artistic melding." "He could be really, incredibly tough on me — and he was. He could be strangely gentle with me as well, which is the thing that draws me back to him." The kinder, gentler side may not fit the provocateur's image that friends say he plays up. But it's truly Lars, says Windeløv, especially because of 5-year-old Benjamin, the one of Von Trier's four children most like Daddy: "Lars suffers at home now, so he knows what we go through." He's a softie, says Fallon Hogan, whose newborn baby was on set: "Can you imagine another production where I'll be sitting next to the director at breakfast, and he'll say, 'Let me hold the baby'?"
Truth is, Von Trier is "very intimidated by people," says Jean-Marc Barr, who has appeared in four Von Trier films and is godfather to two of his kids. He's also sweetly insecure; second thoughts about his comments on the U.S. led him to jump into his golf cart, speed over to interrupt this reporter's interview with Windeløv, declare "I'm not anti-American!" and break into an off-key rendition of America the Beautiful.
You can't accuse Von Trier of ignoring his instincts, which next take him to Dear Wendy, a look at American gun culture that he'll write and Vinterberg will direct. Then he'll go back to the era of slavery with Manderlay, part two of his U.S.A. trilogy. His fear of flying means he still won't visit the place, but he makes no apologies. "You have to find a way of saying what you have to say," he says.
Those who can put up with hearing what he has to say can't help being moved — often to tears. He may not leap over buildings in a single bound. But give him three hours and he'll crush your heart. In a tragically, beautifully Lars Von Trier way, that must make him Superman.
- JEFF CHU | Copenhagen
- Lars von Trier directs Nicole Kidman in Dogville