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excerpt from interview w/ Lars von Trier by Chris Heath in GQ:

After working with Trier, Björk declared that she would never make another movie. “Fundamentally,” says Trier, “it was a problem that both of us, normally with things, we got it our way, where we decided as a dictator over a product. She was used to doing that and I was used to doing that…” Things started off badly. Trier says she was 24 hours late for their first meeting, explaining that she had just had to go at the last minute to a party on a Greek island via private jet as if there was no way someone wouldn’t understand that. “She said it with such pleasure—it was such a wonderful thing. And straightaway I said to her ‘Can’t you see why this will never work?’”

Posted January 7, 2012 at 1:41pm in Björk Lars von Trier cinema Chris Heath interviews quotes GQ Dancer in the Dark OPP

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I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can’t take it, because I’m pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said, “What did you expect? All major directors are ‘sexist’, a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality!”

My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one[s] that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier’s case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the “real” world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment[’s] imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this “soul-robbery”.

— Björk

Posted January 7, 2012 at 1:22pm in Björk Dancer in the Dark Lars von Trier cinema quotes vids Bangkok Youtube 1996 Bangkok International Airport