Interview: Lars von Trier, director

‘You could get me to say almost anything,” says Lars von Trier. “If you really wanted a headline you could easily get me to go there and I’m game in that sense.” It’s early September and the former enfant terrible of world cinema (he’s now 55, which is way too old to be any kind of “enfant”) is sitting at a computer at his Zentropa studio complex near Copenhagen explaining via Skype how he “became a Nazi all of a sudden” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

“There’s a provocation in the films, and there’s the provocation that lies outside the film, like what happened in Cannes,” he says in reference to the hysterically reported press conference for his new film Melancholia during which he jokingly – and somewhat indelicately – responded to a question about his German roots by declaring himself to be a Nazi (the festival subsequently banned him). “But that is [perhaps] me being naïve. I cannot spend my life trying to control what I say. I don’t want to be a politician or a diplomat or anything. I want to spend my life doing films. And I’m arrogant in the sense that if you can’t handle my worst, you don’t deserve my best.”

Melancholia certainly falls into the latter category. An ambitious, beautiful, serene apocalyptic saga revolving around two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who are confronting the imminent end of the world together, it’s his best film since Dogville – and his most accessible, too. That may come as something of a surprise given that it’s also a quietly provocative study of depression that uses the framework and tropes of a disaster movie to represent the condition’s debilitating all-consuming nature (a condition from which von Trier himself suffers). Yet the film is shot through with such a lush, intense strain of romanticism – beginning with a sumptuous, slow-motion montage showing the world coming to an end while Wagner’s prelude for Tristan and Isolde drifts over the soundtrack – that in the end, it’s not all that hard to see how it might have a beguiling effect on audiences, particularly those still recoiling from the full-tilt horror of Antichrist (remember that scissor-slicing clitoridectomy?).

Typically, though, this has become a bone of contention for Von Trier, who reckons Melanchnolia skirts a little too closely to the aesthetic of a mainstream American film (it really doesn’t). “When you write it, you don’t imagine it will look like whipped double cream,” he says, somewhat cryptically. “Romanticism is something that is used so much in mainstream films, and with very little consideration. I feel a little ashamed since it was a pleasure doing it. But I’m not proud of it.”

When I ask him to elaborate on why he’s not proud of the film, he starts talking about his late mother. “I just said to someone else that all my films are made really to provoke my dead mother and he said, ‘How does this film provoke your dead mother?’ And I thought about it and said, ‘Not at all.’ So it feels a little empty somehow.”

But why is he trying to provoke his dead mother? He laughs. “That is a very good question, because I tell you, she’s not worth it. I don’t know. It’s just that somehow, when you get older, you take over your parents’ points of view and I have taken over hers. But I am a very critical man and I am very critical of her. My father, who wasn’t even my father because she screwed somebody else – I hold him very dearly: more dearly from year to year. [My mother] she was a bitch; she was an extremely dominating woman. My poor father was weaker, he was Jewish and everything, I’m on his side. I don’t know why…” He trails off chuckling to himself. “It’s a very delicate psychological problem.”

Amateur Freudians might be tempted to relate his feelings about his mother to the prominence of women in his films. Much like Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Manderlay and Antichrist, Melancholia is built around female protagonists being put through the emotional wringer. Von Trier says this is down to the influence of the pioneering Danish film-maker Carl Theodor Dreyer on his work, but when pushed he opens up a little further.

“All the films are about myself, of course, and though I doubt I have a more feminine side than other people, I do feel well represented by women somehow.” He thinks about it a bit more. “Let me put it another way: I would feel badly represented if it was a man. It’s very difficult for me to find a male actor who would represent me, but it’s quite easy for me to find some female actors who represent me. I can’t explain why.”

Is it perhaps because women performers often seem more willing to give more of themselves on screen than male actors?

“It’s certainly much easier for me to work with women somehow,” he nods. “But also, I think men are a little dull. Because I’m a man myself I think I can read them too easily; it’s just too banal. But when you put it through a female filter, then there comes a mysticism and life in another way. That’s the closest I can get.”

Except it’s not really. After discussing why he thinks Hollywood A-listers like Dunst and Nicole Kidman line up to work with him (“I think they feel I will do some good for them”) he comes up with another theory to explain why he makes films mostly about women.

“Maybe it’s because in my life I had a lot of difficulties with women and I never thought I was sexy or attractive or anything. Maybe it’s down to horniness that I want to work with them.” He laughs to himself again. “That’s not a very artistic argument, but when good things come out of it, it’s fine.”

Whatever his motivations, it appears to be a mutually beneficial relationship. He gives actors artistic credibility (Dunst won the best actress prize at Cannes); they give him the commercial clout needed to keep working.

His need to work certainly seems to be important for von Trier, though given his ability to do so is so often predicated on generating controversy (after making the little-seen Danish comedy The Boss of it All in 2006 he realised he couldn’t afford to make films in his native language), it does raise the question of whether he’s sincere about the films he makes. “I can only say that they are sincere in the way that I believe I provoke myself,” he says. “I am a provocateur, you can say that. But I have to believe that it’s more than a just a show.”

As we wrap up, I ask him how he’s perceived in Denmark, especially now that other Danish filmmakers, such as Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn, are making a big splash on the world stage. He says he’s not sure, then he tells me a story about how a bunch of Danish newspapers recently asked him to comment on the fact that Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing extremist responsible for the summer-camp massacre in Oslo in July, listed Dogville among his favourite films. Von Trier responded by telling them that the extremist group Breivik was a member of had links to Denmark going back 30 years. “That made me very unpopular. The papers did a big thing about me being an asshole and stuff.

“I’m used to it though,” he sighs. “Persona non grata is the closest you can get, and I’m quite proud of that somehow.”

lMelancholia is in cinemas from Friday 30 September.