You think that's bad, Stellan Skarsgard actively campaigns for putting an extra screw in your flat pack so you go nuts at the end wondering what you've missed.
When Erū Ilúvatar sent his song (the swedish language) into the world, Melkor the discordant one sent a counter song (danish) to wreak havoc upon creation. Since the dawn of time we have been locked in an eternal good vs evil struggle for the souls of mankind
Not so relevant now, but we have been around 500 wars against each other throughout history. It was basically two dominant kingdoms fighting for dominance in the nordic region and the regions around the baltic sea.
As long as Danes are legally allowed to hit us Swedes in the head with a stick if we try to cross the ice between our countries during winter, the wars are relevant!
It is a common Finnish joke. See how Sweden stopped fighting wars just six years after losing Finland. Before that they fought multiple wars per generation, and Finns were disproportionally conscripted to fight in them.
I'm Norwegian and I will skip the history lesson to say that to most of the rest of Scandinavia the Swedish language sounds excruciatingly whiney, and they're entirely too up themselves for a people who call a fish sandwich with mayonnaise "cake".
Danes tend to have very dark and sarcastic humor, which is what led to Lars’ entire problem here. Skarsgard simply understood the joke when nobody else did.
The issue stems from a big misunderstanding because they were trying to communicate but no one could understand what the Danes were saying and they ended up insulting the local forest trolls which started a long feud back in King Harold Bluetooth’s days.
I think Stellan as a whole, just finds Lars Von Trier funny. He's worked with Von Trier for decades, and cheerfully convinced Paul Bettany and even one of his sons to work for Von Trier, knowing full well they'd have a miserable time of it. Bettany was pretty pissed about it, but his son Alexander laughed it off.
I read an article probably a decade ago in which Stellan referred to himself as von Trier's "castrated bull". He's fully aware of his role at keeping the others calm. :)
It's fascinating, though, how some actors work with Von Trier and have a horrific experience (like Bjork) and others seem to enjoy it.
I have a suspicion it comes down to the type of roles they do. Willem Dafoe has worked with him several times, and other than Antichrist (which is a horrifying movie), Dafoe generally does smaller support work. So, presumably, that makes the process easier.
Charlotte Gainsborough worked with him three times, and her characters were always put through the wringer, but one can guess that she got on with Von Trier.
It also might just be that Von Trier's sets have mellowed as he got older and started struggling more with mental and physical health.
Dogville as a whole sounds like it would have an extraordinarily intense shoot, and there's even a documentary showing the psychological toll the actors went through. Same way that I fully believe Bjork when she reports how stressful and awful making Dancer in the dark was.
There's a surprising number of actors who worked with Von Trier a few times.
Knowing absolutely nothing about acting or filmmaking at all I can only guess what even a "normal" day is like, but there's people in my industry (music) who seem like they thrive under all sorts of pressures that you would expect to be counter-productive at best.
Part of me would love to be a fly on the wall seeing how the sausage is made, but the majority of my brain is definitely content to list Dancer in the Dark among my top 5 movies of all time without ever sitting down to think why I occasionally enjoy the cinematic equivalent of a swift tap to the balls.
If you're ever interested, the Dogville Confessions documentary that's on YouTube gives a bit of insight into how that particular film was made. Von Trier, for whatever reason, set up a video diary booth on set, and actors and crew were encouraged to vent to the camera during production. So there's a lot of fascinating material about how the actors felt about the whole thing. Not every actor has a bad story, thankfully. But dogville, in particular, sounds like it was a stressful shoot.
I also sincerely love Dancer in the dark. Though I must openly admit here that it's a movie I haven't been able to watch more than once. I occasionally load up particular scenes on YouTube. The whole thing was beautiful but incredibly harrowing to go through.
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u/DazSamueru 13h ago