Lars Trier Quotations

One morning I greeted the cast naked in the front drive and insisted that today was to be a nude day. No, we didn't have any nudity problems.

I would argue that the aesthetics in flattening out a scene completely are obsolete.

Idiocy is like hypnosis or ejaculation: if you want it, you can't have it-and if you don't want it, you can.

I have maneuvered my way through four or five different types of cancer that I completely succumbed to. It's amazing how many probable types of cancer can arise when hypochondria permits.

If Breaking the Waves had been rendered with a conventional technique, I don't think you could have tolerated the story.

I enjoy dialogue that leads to something more comical, and at the same time I like the added poignancy, too.

I give myself a task. This time, the task was to do a musical.

I also have scenes with music in them, and we have recorded the music on location-a bit like the first talk movies.

I also wanted t do a film with a religious motif, a film about miracles. At the same time, I wanted to do a completely naturalistic film.

I think some of the acting scenes with Bjork look beautiful. Yes, to me, they are beautiful, but I am quite fond of Bjork.

I think technology right now is great, because it makes filming so easy, you know.

Reproduction is a little stupid. You have to put a little something in. It's like in the church you pay a little money to the tithe.

It felt important to find some actors who really had the enthusiasm to participate. And I think it feels as if the heart is in it among those we finally chose.

I suppose Swedenborg might have been pleased to have a room named after him, a wall-papered room with two chairs and two doors and a simple painting of a landscape containing a tiger and a serpent and a few birds.

We had to turn up the colors in the dance sequences to make people feel that there were different levels of the film. I was not so fond of that, because it made the dancing more glamorous in a superficial way than what I really wanted, but it was necessary for the understanding of the two levels.

Visible good easily becomes trite; visually there is very little material left-you know, you make a sunbeam pass over a character or a situation and it becomes far too pathetic and banal.

When we later cut down the scenes, our only thought was to increase the intensity in the performance, without regard as to whether the image is in focus.

You cannot bring in props-if you are filming in a house, you use the furniture and props that are present in that house. If our fiction necessitates the use of a certain prop, we have to film where the prop can be found instead of moving the prop to where we would like to be.

This way of working with actors that I have found now is normally a great pleasure, because it means giving a lot of freedom to some people-and to see them enjoy that freedom and to give to the project is usually very nice.

We had shot very long scenes, and no scene was like the other. The actors were allowed to move within the scene as they pleased, and they never needed to follow any determined action.

Before, I worked with a storyboard, and that meant that the image wasn't good. There was a lot of things that you had to live up to.

The rule means-as I interpret it-that you are allowed to do nothing with the sound and picture after shooting: sound and picture hang together, and neither may be changed or moved afterwards.

I've taken the circuitous path of being interested in people.

Perhaps it sounds pretentious, but in one way or another I hope that you can see that every image contains an idea. It certainly sounds presumptuous-and perhaps it's also untruthful. But as I see it, every image and every cut is thought out. They are not there by chance.

Opera is more like melodrama. And the good thing about opera is that if you can accept that people sing instead of talk, then you don't have to go in and out of it. And that means you can have your emotions with you.

A load of cinematic effects that otherwise seem easy or cheap to me suddenly become difficult again... can't you hear that this is the only right way of doing it?

It was fun having a musician on the set and then having to communicate with him-it was a completely new discipline which I found interesting.

For me as a director, it is extremely fun trying to add the music on the spot. Especially the moment when the music sets in and the emotional chords are engaged, is a very important means of expression.

It should all come from the main character's idea that life is beautiful anywhere. It doesn't have to be light with spotlights and blue lights and slow motion or whatever, life is great anyway.

It's something important in the relationship between the artist and his public.

It's... a matter of making the actors responsible for their characters, so if they felt that their character would read a Donald Duck magazine, they would bring one themselves.

In many ways the six weeks of shooting was the most intense film experience I've ever had.

In many ways I also have an understanding for-or rather, that people are engaged by spiritual questions and that they are so in an extreme manner. It is just that, if you want to create a melodrama, you have to furnish it with certain obstacles.

I'm much calmer. We had a lot of time problems going to Cannes. The print was ready one day before it was shown. Now I feel very good.

I'm moving to a new house. I moved away from where I was born. I lived there for 44 years, so I just moved. So I'm actually trying to grow up. And I got myself a sports car, that's fantastic, an Alfa Romeo Spider. It's a two-seater. I have four children. I feel like I'm 18 years old.

I kind of have to see it through to the end, don't I? But at the same time it's also rather dull doing something for the second time, I must admit. I've never made anything twice in my life.

I had to fight so much for the film. It was not very pleasant, but it's rewarding in another way. But it has not been pleasant.

If you examine the history of the cinema the way I'm constantly doing, I've tried to seek some of the lightness and enjoyment possessed by the films I refer to.

If you are using a 35 mm camera, it typically means shoulder mounted-and we actually constructed a shoulder mount for the small video-cameras. So you can discuss where the limit is with all the various ways you can attach a camera to a cameraman.

If you go on correcting a script, you may lose your enthusiasm. It almost happened in this process, too, when we spent ages changing scenes and moving back and forth; but in the end we returned to the original, and the final version of the film is very close to the script.

In the forest scene we had put a mike up a tree to capture the ambient sound... it is like reinventing movie-making, don't you see?

In the earlier films, it was a conscious decision not to be too close to the actors.

I prefer to work with unassailable ideas. And I wanted to do a film about goodness.

If you tell a man what to do in real life, to which extent is it reality and to which extent are you in control?

But if it means that people who used to be limited by a notion of how a proper film should be, if those people now feel that they can make film-then I find that has a certain quality to it.

I'd toyed with a couple of ideas beforehand, but I hadn't written a single cue, and it was a wonderful feeling to just write away.

The essence of my dramaturgical considerations is that I want to chuck out the most superfluous, habitual constraints and escape from rigidity, but at the same time film is a means of communication.

The film must be shot on 35 mm film and in Academy, which is a clearly defined format. But when you enter into a collective, you have to submit to the collective.

The members of my family that I've shown the film to have also been severely critical toward it.

The last year has been more full of fear than ever before... but on the personal level, each of my films is a little monument.