One way that you can write scripts is that you can take your own personality and you put it into some characters and that is exactly what I've done here. "To me it's very much a film about anxiety.
"I was not very aware of what I was doing when I wrote the script, but scriptwriting has always been fun to me and one of the things you have to do when you are depressed is to find a little something that can make you relax and feel the tiniest bit of joy in life. Nor, he says, has making the film helped him overcome his depression in any way. He admits that he was "not very conscious" when he wrote and made Antichrist and strayed from his usual practice of revisiting the script again and again in order to make sure it was working in the way he would have wished. They are more statements of how women or female characters are inside my imagination." "They are all fiction films, so they are not statements of how women are. It is put to him that these are recurring themes, not just in this film, but throughout his body or work. Listening to him speak, you get the impression that he enjoys some of the controversy he has notoriously provoked in the media with films such as The Idiots, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, although the accusations of misogyny seem to rattle him slightly more than the rest. It is, however, some of these more psychological excursions, exploring the nature of the relationship between man and woman, which have led to von Trier being labelled a woman-hater. These scenes, while headline grabbing, also do the film something of a disservice as they have largely drawn attention away from other sequences in which von Trier touches on, although never adequately explores, topics much more deserving of comment than the brutal art-porn. Most of what has earned the film its shocking headlines centres on graphic scenes of genital mutilation. Here, Dafoe, a therapist, attempts to "cure" his partner of the intense grief she is experiencing which has led to borderline psychosis. Speaking at a question and answer session in London last week following a preview screening of the film, 53-year-old von Trier, who was appearing via a Skype link-up as his various anxieties prevent him from flying, seemed slightly bemused and unsettled by the furore surrounding the film.īut why is it creating such fuss? Antichrist is the story (in so far as there is any plot) of a couple known only as He and She, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who, following the death of their young child, travel to a remote cabin in the midst of a forest known (not very subtly) as Eden. In true Daily Mail fashion, the journalist calling for the film to be banned, Christopher Hart, then confessed to not having actually seen it. The article was headlined "What does it take for a film to get banned these days?" and Antichrist was said to plumb "new depths of sexual explicitness, excruciating violence and degradation".
Just last week the Daily Mail ran an article bemoaning the decision of the censors in the UK to pass the film with an 18-certificate. Von Trier himself has been labelled a misogynist.
What is clear is that it's appropriate that the notes for the media are some attempt at an explanation of the movie, as it has been the media's reaction to the film, since it was first screened earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, which has earned it arguably more column inches than any art house film in history.Īntichrist has been called "the sickest film ever made", "an abomination" and "easily one of the biggest debacles in Cannes film history". That's not a confession, it's a comment." All the time I'm telling everybody how neurotic I am. THE press notes for Danish director Lars von Trier's latest film Antichrist contained a so-called "Director's Confession" which explained that the film was written as a form of therapy in the midst of a deep depression when "everything, no matter what, seemed unimportant, trivial."Įver the difficult customer, von Trier now disputes the wording which says it is a confession by saying "some smart PR guy put this on.
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