itting in a secluded corner of a converted Danish military base, Lars Von Trier, the director of Breaking the Waves and Dogville, is talking anatomically. “There are two types of d***s,” he says, beginning a brief lecture on the male member that is as frank and quotidian as it is indiscreet. The first type, explains the 53-year-old push-button provocateur, is defined by length. The second, girth. “Willem Dafoe!” he says, anticipating his own knockout punch line, “has a combination of both!” Dafoe, of course, is the star of Von Trier’s latest shocker Antichrist, a sexually explicit psychodrama that was nonetheless almost ruined, its maker says, by the often alarming sight of, well, Willy Jr. “We had to cut it out in so many places because it was ridiculously big,” Von Trier says, giggling manically. “It made no sense at all! I mean, if you saw it you would understand!”
Giddy reflections on Dafoe’s anatomical quirks are, it seems, a welcome but only brief distraction from the reality of a bête noire project that has produced nothing but heartache for Von Trier. The most critically hated movie from the Cannes Film Festival this year (indeed, some say from the event’s entire history), Antichrist has been decried as “misogynistic”, “abhorrent”, “an abomination” and, from Variety, “grotesque”. A critic from The Sunday Times called for the movie to be banned.
These body blows have not gone unfelt by Von Trier, who sits curled in a battered leather sofa in a one-room office bungalow on the outer edges of the Zentropa studios — a sprawling production complex in suburban Copenhagen, complete with writers’ cabins, swimming pool and tennis courts. “I was better at taking criticisms when I was younger,” he says, scratching anxiously at a scraggy half-beard. The director, in wire-rimmed spectacles, grey T-shirt and tattered denims, gives the impression of a fragile academic tramp, a portrait that is accentuated by a sporadic stutter that emerges in moments of high emotion, and a nervous hand tremor that’s conspicuous throughout. “But it’s always painful, to some degree,” he continues. “And I hate going to Cannes anyway. It’s agony watching your film with an audience of people who you know are going to loathe it. Because the film is well meant. It’s a deeply personal part of me that I’m showing.”
This is an archetypal statement from Von Trier, a director who, over 14 years and six films, has provoked and prodded his audience while maintaining a stance of complete openness. He is an avowed fan of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, and his work consistently displays a penchant for the formalism of the former and the artistic obscurantism of the latter. But he’s also an emotionalist, who claims to be speaking directly from within, even as he orchestrates from without, and has more in common with the heart-stirring manipulations of Steven Spielberg or Douglas Sirk — the latter, in particular, who was forever depicting women going blind, losing their livelihoods and facing a cruel world.
Antichrist, Von Trier explains, is a therapy session writ large, conceived during a particularly bleak bout of the depressive episodes that he has suffered through his life. “I used the working process of the film to help me,” he says. “Even sitting down and writing ten pages of script a day was a start. I had less and less time to think about myself.”
The process involved, he says, “throwing reason overboard” and simply putting images together that were plucked from his subconscious mind, with very little reworking. “Look!” he says, pointing to the opposite wall, almost empty but for a long red line that carries the bare plot nodes of Antichrist across the entire width of the building. “That wall would normally be filled out with all sorts of notes and drawings, but it just never happened.” The finished movie was almost “completely intuitive”.
The ostensible subject of the film is a couple, simply called “He” and “She”, and played by Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are so traumatised by the tragic death of their only child that they retreat to a woodland hideaway, called Eden, and there engage each other in an internecine battle of wits that culminates in torture, genital mutilation and murder. The movie is sui generis — part Don’t Look Now, part Strindbergian melodrama, part torture- porn horror and yet none of the above.
Instead, its real power lies in the unnerving psychological undertow of Von Trier’s images: in the opening silvery slow-motion depiction of the sex between Dafoe and Gainsbourg and the suggestion therein that the ravenous sexual appetites of He and She “caused” the death of their son (in the film, the son dies while they are having sex); or in the shot of Gainsbourg’s She penetrating with her forefinger a gaping bloody hole in Dafoe’s leg; or in the depiction of Dafoe’s erect member (actually a “smaller” penile stand-in, belonging to a German porn star called Horst) ejaculating a minor fountain of blood; or in the stomach-churning close-up of Gainsbourg placing rusty hardware scissors between her legs and snipping off her clitoris.
The latter image has sparked the most vitriolic attacks against the film. The director, apparently, is baffled. “To me this film is very much about anxiety, and about sexual anxiety,” he says earnestly, while adjusting his glasses with a shaking hand. “Since this woman is overwhelmed by her sexuality, or afraid of it, it made sense that she would destroy it, or destroy the centre of it, like that.”
Von Trier-bashers, nonetheless, are unappeased by suggestions of ingenuousness, and point to the director’s obvious skill as a film-maker as a sign that he is somehow “toying” with his audience. A director this capable, so the argument goes, must clearly have an agenda other than the communication of an inner personal truth.
In all previous films, from his earliest noir efforts such as The Element of Crime (1984) right through to the musical extravaganza Dancer in The Dark (2000), Von Trier (who adopted the “Von” as a jokey affectation during his film school years) has always seemed to be a director in total control of his material. Similarly, his creation and realisation of the Dogme 95 movement, which was committed to the removal of extraneous film-making artifice, succeeded in changing the face of modern cinema. All this explains his rash, and only slightly tongue-in-cheek, announcement to the press at Cannes: “I am the best director in the world.” In short, the idea of Von Trier at the mercy of his work is incomprehensible for many.
“The idea that I’m toying with the audience is, well, very elegant and refined, but it’s simply not the case,” he says. “If you want to gain anything creatively, then you have to be true to yourself.”
Accusations of misogyny, however, springing from an entire career fuelled by the depiction of female protagonists who are abused by their menfolk, would seem more difficult to dodge. The sight of Emily Watson’s simplistic Bess sailing off to a sexually sadistic death in Breaking the Waves, or of Björk’s blind Selma screaming hysterically at the gallows in Dancer in the Dark, may be dramatically cathartic, but viewed alongside the entirety of Von Trier’s female-baiting oeuvre, they seem to reflect the appetites of a creator who relishes and ultimately delights in the abuse of women.
Not so, says Von Trier, adding that we need to look closely at the gender roles in his movies. “The male protagonists in my films are basically idiots who don’t understand shit,” he says. “Whereas the women are much more human, and much more real. It’s the women I identify with in all my films. And especially with the girl in this film.” He sits back on the sofa and sighs. The words sink in, and you try to imagine the unfathomable levels of self-hatred that would propel someone to repeatedly restage their own immolation, albeit in tremulous female form, throughout their professional life. Is it tough, then, being Lars Von Trier?
“Yes,” he says, not smiling. “It is tough, but maybe not for these reasons. I think these films, and these roles, are more the symptoms rather than the real problem.” More silence. So, what is the real problem? He reaches out for a glass of water, and pulls it, again shaking, to his mouth. “The real problem is that I have so much anxiety in my life that I want to puke whenever I think about it.” He describes his physical state as that of someone who makes a sudden driving error on the motorway and feels an icy but momentary shock coursing throughout their body. “But I have this feeling of adrenalin ten times a day, and it doesn’t disappear.” He begins to stutter. “It is, ssss, and I just, rrrr, I lived a big anxiety attack yesterday and I fffffff,” he stops and, looking wildly upset, with himself and with life, shouts, “F***! I really, really, really hate it! I’ve had it since I was 6 and it doesn’t get any better. And I’m not proud to talk about it.”
Usually, the familiar Von Trier psychological profile describes a man from a painfully liberal Copenhagen background (both parents, Ulf and Inger, were civil servants and Communist Party members), who began making home movies at 11, was a prodigiously talented student at the Danish Film School in his twenties, but whose world nonetheless collapsed in 1995. Then the 39-year-old film-maker learnt from his dying mother that his biological father was not her husband, but a lawyer from a prominent Danish family. The movies that followed — Breaking the Waves and beyond — could thus be read as a collective act of vengeance against a mother who kept one of life’s fundamental truths hidden. Today, however, the prospect of imagining the young Von Trier, self-tormented since childhood, is more potent still. And so you have to ask, what happened when he was 6?
Another sad sigh. “The only thing I know is that if I asked my mother, ‘Will I die tonight?’ she would say, ‘Statistically, it’s not very likely. But there is a chance’. Whereas I say to my children (he has four, from two marriages), ‘No, go to sleep’. And that is the difference. It would have been wonderful to have been allowed to be a child for some years, instead of being treated as an adult from such a young age.”
He adds that his illness is a physiological condition too, and that his mother was also “very nervous and phobic” and that the same “tendencies” are visible in his own children, some of whom are already in therapy. The psychological suffering of his offspring, particularly his twin sons, aged 11 (from his current marriage to Bente Froge), is hard for Von Trier to contemplate. “Why?!” he spits, shaking his head. “Why the f*** do they have to go through this?!”
It must be noted here that to many, and mostly from afar, Von Trier’s anxieties are seen as a part of his grand plan of manipulation. A portrait of the tortured artist as an ill man. Up close, however, it’s miserably obvious to see that this is no act, and that Von Trier has survived and thrived as a creative force solely by channelling these same all- consuming anxieties into his life’s work.
Moments of silence follow, and Von Trier talks some more, and affectionately, about the boys, and about their growing competitiveness, but he seems slightly spent, even as he walks through the rest of the requisite career bites. Thus he mentions his relationships with his leading ladies, including Nicole Kidman, Emily Watson and Björk, and flatly denies claims by the third (which, in fact, have long since been recanted), that his working methods are exploitative.
“Nicole, Emily and Björk, too, were all fabulous during the shooting [of, respectively, Dogville, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark]. We all understood each other, and I think I achieved good results with them because they saw it as a marriage of sorts, and let me take them to difficult places.” He might have added, but didn’t, that Gainsbourg’s Best Actress award for Antichrist at Cannes, voted on by a female-led jury (Isabelle Huppert was the president) would seem to vindicate his methods.
He moves on, and talks about his constant stylistic reinvention, saying, “My problem is that I really get bored if I do something two times.” And he contemplates his future, or not, as a film-maker. “I have no ideas right now,” he says. “I am completely blank. So, maybe it’s all over for me.”
On the other hand, he says, he does have a little garden, and that he takes great pleasure from tending to his plants. Or at least he did, until he began to see gardening as “a kind of ethnic slaughter, where the weak ones are taken out and killed, and where sadism is rife”. And that, it seems, essentially, is Von Trier personified — a man who can’t even plant a daffodil bulb without seeing the face of universal nihilism staring back at him. “There is one little thing of which I am proud,” he eventually says, when pushed, still curled in the corner of his sofa, still shaking, but smiling this time. “It’s that I’ve decided a direction to walk in, and I’m sticking to it, somehow. And it’s not obvious to everyone that I’m going in one direction. But to me, it’s quite logical. And it’s maybe even important.” Which is a quiet, unassuming way of saying: “I may not actually be the best director in the world. But I’m getting there.”
Antichrist goes on selected release on Friday
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