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 fighting against my will to control. I think that is what I am doing. I would like to accept things in life, in all matters of life I would like to accept, but it's so difficult. I think we all have this struggle.
I did a lot of strange things. But I am a bad Catholic that's for sure. Although I think it's difficult to believe in evil.
I think that limitations are the most important part of any art form
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A film has to be like a stone in the shoe.
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.
Evil gives you far more strings to pull. But I must say that I have never been interested in the psychology of evil, not in the slightest. Perhaps I'm not interested in evil, but in the dark sides of human beings.
It's always been a lie that it's difficult to make films.