Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter, best known for his films Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves, Melancholia and Europa. He is considered one of the great film auteurs and widely regarded as one of the most accomplished living directors in world cinema. In a prolific and controversial career spanning almost four decades, his work became distinct for its genre and technical innovation, the intensely confrontational - sometimes "humorous" - examination of existential, social and...
NationalityDanish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth30 April 1956
CountryDenmark
I'm having a vacation, and it's so beautiful, and maybe I'll never get another film idea in my life.
If I made a musical in the beginning of my career, it would have been crane shots and tracking shots and people coming out of cakes and whatever, but these techniques are something that I've left behind me.
I'm very proud of being persona non grata. I've never been that before in my life, and that suits me extremely wellI'm known for provocations, but I like provocations when they have a purpose. And this had no purpose whatsoever. Because I'm not Mel Gibson. I'm definitely not Mel Gibson.
I understand Hitler... I sympathize with him a bit
You could say that when you introduce humour to your work, you also step back a little from it. You create a distance
Only a fool does not fear actors, but you can't beat them, and if you can't beat them, join them, as they say. As I've got older I've become very interested in that part of the work
There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug-addicts. Who the hell would bother with a Rolling Stones without booze or with a Jimi Hendrix without heroin?
The risk is that you furnish the project with new suggestions to try and freshen it up; it's not always beneficial. You risk betraying the original intention with the story, forgetting what it is you really want to portray.
My films are about ideals that clash with the world. Every time it's a man in the lead, they have forgotten about the ideals. And every time it's a woman in the lead, they take the ideals all the way.
Actors need bricks to play with, and in fact we rejected all the improvised fragments we had made without a plan. Improvisation without a plan is like tennis without tennis balls.
I'm happy that I'm alive. I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I'm sure that later on I'll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive.
I sit there pouring out my woes year after year, coming up with one enormity after another about my mother and the way she let me down; but it doesn't make me any the less fearful.