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 think working with actors is a little bit how a chef would work with a potato or a piece of meat. You have to kind of have a look at the potato or the piece of meat and see what kind of possibilities are in the ingredient. I know I'm using the wrong metaphor. I think my job is to see what potato is there and from there, just work under their conditions.
The secret ingredient to sex is love.
My films generally center around thousands of pictures being flashed in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion.
More than anything, there are more images in evil. Evil is based far more on the visual, whereas good has no good images at all.
I am a man who likes to control things, and if I can't control them totally I will not control them at all.
A film should be like a rock in the shoe.
Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that Ive always demanded more from the sunset,
I think it's a very strange question that I have to defend myself. I don't feel that. You are all my guests, it's not the other way around, that's how I feel.
Basically, I'm afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking.
I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them.
If anyone would like to hit me, they are perfectly welcome. I must warn you, though, that I might enjoy it. So maybe it's not the right kind of punishment.
I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.
It's the opening of Manderlay in Cannes, and I'm sitting next to this guy who's writing for a tiny fictitious French paper called On the Sunny Side, and he's writing a review on the film, and he's obviously bored. Then he tells me about all the cars he owns, and how rich he is, and all these things. So, at a certain point, he says, "So what do you do?" Then I take out this very strange hammer we have in the Danish building business, and I say, "I kill." And then I kill him. It is as stupid as it sounds.
If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.