Lars von Trier interview

Dave Calhoun catches up with the controversial director at his Danish headquarters.

Jul 28 2005

'The Idiots' shocked with its mix of graphic sex and 'spazzing' while 'Dancer in the Dark' and 'Dogville' enraged America, but Lars von Trier's latest film – about slavery – has caused barely a ripple. Has the director lost his touch? Dave Calhoun went to Denmark to hear him hold forth on shooting, lederhosen and 'pissing gnomes'.

I'm talking to Lars von Trier, Denmark's most famous filmmaker, in a wooden cabin on the outskirts of Copenhagen.

We're at Zentropa, the film studio co-founded by von Trier in 1992 on the site of an old military HQ, which explains the conspicuous presence of a US Army tank outside his office – a gift from the US to Denmark after WWII. Zentropa has the air (and, today, the weather) of an alternative, Scandinavian version of Butlins.

A series of low-rise buildings house studio space, editing suites, a film school for teenagers and offices. There are hints of von Trier's eccentric approach to his work everywhere.

One corridor is painted the same shade of green as the Death Row wing of an American prison (a hangover from 'Dancer in the Dark', in which Björk ends up facing execution), and each of the corridor's rooms is named after a famous leftist revolutionary: Andreas Baader, Fidel Castro, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky…

The centrepiece of the Zentropa estate (known as 'Filmbuyen' or 'Film Town'; other movie companies live here too) is a large hall known as 'the nursing room'.

It feels like a superior Scout hut. An entire wall houses an array of awards (I spy the Palme d'Or for 'Dancer in the Dark' somewhere near a stuffed fish).

Below them is a piano where, so one Zentropa employee tells me, staff gather every Friday morning for a communal singsong.

It's here that I bump into Zentropa co-founder Peter Ålbaek Jensen. He tells me he's recently placed a job advert in the local paper for a trumpet player who also happens to have legal skills.

It's Jensen's peculiar way of hiring a new lawyer. Zentropa thrives on ritual and self-mythology.

As I walk across a lawn outside, another employee tells me about the three brightly coloured gnomes that sit on the grass. Apparently, they're known as the 'pissing gnomes', as it's a Zentropa ritual to, well, piss on them. The story goes that when Catherine Deneuve came here to film 'Dancer in the Dark', shocked witnesses were too late to prevent her from giving them a big hug and kiss.

Von Trier is known for throwing such niceties as 'What's your next stupid question?' into interviews, but today he's in a good mood. He laughs a lot. We talk about his 'bad boy' reputation and how it stems largely from a series of tempestuous press conferences at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has premiered six films since 1984.

'I don't care what people think of me,' he says. 'But Cannes is actually quite aggressive. You change a little bit because you have to survive it. You become the politician who has made a big mistake and is being asked, "So, what do you have to say for yourself?" '

It's here, in a quiet Danish suburb, that von Trier has been imagining America since he wrote and filmed 'Dancer in the Dark' in 1999. He followed it with two films in a planned American trilogy, 'Dogville' in 2003 and 'Manderlay', which will be released this year.

He also wrote the script for Thomas Vinterberg's 'Dear Wendy', another story set in the US, but inspired by von Trier’s fascination with guns.

The country is something of an obsession for the 49-year-old director, whose fear of flying means he has never travelled there. He rarely leaves Denmark. Earlier this year he made the trip to Cannes in customary fashion: by camper van with his brother-in-law listening to copious amounts of Elton John.

Would he travel to America if he could surmount his fear? 'Yes, I would,' he considers. 'Mainly for the countryside. I'm not too crazy about big cities. It's this dream country somehow. I'm totally against the American ideal of being master of your own luck, but it's very romantic. I dream about it.'

At which von Trier suggests that it is only a matter of historical accident that Americans speak English, not German. 'That would have been different. I could make a film – a science-fiction – about how it could have been, in which they all speak German. That would be kind of fun, no? With lederhosen…'

Von Trier has been antagonising audiences for two decades now. Born in 1956, his childhood in Denmark was distinctly liberal: his mother, Inger, was a communist who didn't believe in discipline. He spent three years from 1979 to 1982 at Danish Film School. By 1984, he was at Cannes, looking like an emaciated punk with his shaved head and leather jacket, and presenting his first feature film, 'The Element of Crime'.

But it was his fourth feature, 'Breaking the Waves' (1996), that properly introduced von Trier to British audiences and confirmed his reputation as a troublemaker.

Two years later, 'The Idiots', and its nudity, sex and questionable approach to disability, only pushed this reputation further.

'There is something about the British and Danish sense of humour that is close,' he suggests. 'It's not the same when you talk to Americans. I could see it with the British actors we had on 'Manderlay'. The Americans were much more serious.’

Something unexpected happened when 'Manderlay' premiered at Cannes in May: it only sparked the merest hint of a controversy. In the past, a new Lars von Trier film has been the occasion for an entire side industry of rumour, conjecture, outrage and gossip. 'Björk eats her own dress!' 'Nicole breaks down on set!' 'Lars strips naked!'

Instead, 'Manderlay' passed politely through town. No rows. No vitriol. No theatre. Which is all very odd, considering the plot, which toys provocatively with ideas of race and slavery.

The film continues the story of Grace from 'Dogville' (Bryce Dallas Howard replaces Nicole Kidman) and is executed in the same bare, theatrical style with all the action occurring on a dark soundstage largely devoid of sets. Grace stumbles across a remote plantation in 1930s Alabama that still functions as a slave colony. An initiative to impose democracy backfires, and segregation and racism soon set in.

Critics, as ever, were divided. But most negative reactions so far have been defined by ennui and déjà vu, not anger or offence, despite von Trier's liberal use of the word 'nigger' and his playing with 'blacking up' in the film. Have we become hardened to his brand of mischievous, high-brow provocation?

'It was a little surprising,' says von Trier of the quiet reaction. 'But I think I know why. First of all, for most of Europe, I think, the film is politically correct. In a way that it is not, I'm sure, in America, as the film allows black people to be stupid and to behave like normal people.

'Also, this is a very difficult subject to criticise. If you do so as an American, you're entering an area where you don’t want to be. Slavery is too much of an open wound.'

This summer also sees the release of 'Dear Wendy', a film penned by von Trier but directed by his friend, collaborator and compatriot Thomas Vinterberg, the director of 'Festen' (1998).

Set in a small US town, its hero is Dick (Jamie Bell), an unexceptional American teenager who finds and falls in love with a second-hand gun ('Wendy'), inspiring him to form an underground group that fetishises and trains with all manner of firearms.

Stimulating themes emerge regarding gun-ownership, law-making and state-building. The concerns are distinctly (although not exclusively) American, yet the film was shot completely in Europe: at Zentropa and in a disused German mine.

Von Trier has said the anger 'Dancer in the Dark' generated among US critics has inspired him to keep writing about America. He savoured the conflict. Surely that isn't his main motivation?

'But you don't know me! Tell me something I can't do and I will do it [he laughs]. I have a very simple psyche, you know? It tells me to do the opposite to what people tell me!

'I object to this idea that you can't make a film about a country where you haven't been. That's exactly what Hollywood has done for very many years and they don't give a shit.'

There's also something more personal behind 'Dear Wendy'.

'I'm a hunter actually,' he says, pointing at the wall next to us, where a stuffed deer's head is mounted. 'I've killed this poor animal that looks at me every day like it's pissed off. But I come from this radical family where weapons were the most forbidden thing. Here were two worlds meeting because of weapons. It was a conflict, but I think that's what I work with in all my films.

'All my films have to do with that – how things should be in theory and how stupid theory can be when you're out in the field.'

It's hard to imagine someone as headstrong as von Trier handing a script over to another director. But he and Thomas Vinterberg are close. Vinterberg's production company, Nimbus Films, sits next to Zentropa in Filmbuyen. In 1995, the pair founded the Dogme movement together at von Trier's instigation.

'He needed a framework,' says Anthony Dod Mantle, the cinematographer of 'Dogville' and 'Manderlay'. 'He creates frameworks to justify how he works. He needed to justify 'The Idiots'. Then the Dogme brothers came on board. But the initial reason was he wanted to make 'The Idiots'.

Von Trier shot 'The Idiots' in 1998. The film was a suburban nightmare: middle-class sophisticates pretending to be mentally handicapped – 'spazzing'. The crowning glory was a hardcore orgy. That aside, 'The Idiots' was also noted, like 'Festen', for dismissing genre and stripping away artifice, such as special effects and lighting, to concentrate on narrative and ideas.

In the process, von Trier and Vinterberg became poster-boys for a late '90s movement that championed the new digital film technology, '…and cheap films,' adds von Trier. 'But there is nothing in the Dogme rules about cheap films or digital films.'

Recently, von Trier reached a crisis point. For half a year he tried to write 'Wasington', his planned third film in the American trilogy, but he wasn't happy with the outcome. Now he has decided to postpone that and make a Dogme film next year, his first since 'The Idiots'.

'It's what I've said to all these directors who come to me, saying 'I'm confused, what can I do?' I say, 'Take a little Dogme pill. Relax and nobody will expect anything from you. 'It works, this Dogme pill. So I'm taking a Dogme pill.'

He hasn’t finished the script yet, but when I speak to Vibeke Windeløv, von Trier's producer, she explains that it will be called something like 'The Boss' or 'The Chairman'; she is searching for a business in Copenhagen that will allow its offices and staff to be used in the film.

After our interview concludes, the director offers me a lift to lunch on the back of a golf cart that he uses to drive around Filmbuyen. As we arrive, I tell him that I'm planning to visit Ken Loach on the set of his new film in a few days. He remembers how Loach taught him for a week at the Danish Film School in the early '80s.

'He taught me the meaning of morality, which was something unheard of in the '80s at film school in Denmark.' He goes on to say that he admires the single-mindedness of directors like Loach, directors who follow their own direction, whether or not it means they go out of fashion as Loach did for a long period throughout the 1980s.

'It's important to have directors like that,' says von Trier, unwittingly summing himself up. 'Directors who are quite stubborn and go in one direction without caring what’s happening around them in the film world.'

'Dear Wendy' opens on August 5, while 'Manderlay' screens at the London Film Festival in October and opens in November.

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