IF Lars von Trier hoped to find salvation in Antichrist, his critics had other ideas. The Dogme director tells James Mottram why chaos still reigns despite overcoming severe depression to try to resurrect his career
LARS von Trier is not a well man. As the sign painted in blood-red lettering on his office door says, "Chaos Reigns". Jittery, nervous and unsettled, the 53-year-old Dane even jumps when his mobile phone rings midway through our interview.
"That'
s so unprofessional!" he says, overreacting somewhat. "I hate myself for that. I'll turn it off straight away." Turning off the dark thoughts that have clouded his mind of late has proved less simple for Von Trier. The provocative director behind Breaking The Waves and Dogville is just emerging from a deep depression that threatened to swallow him up.
It began shortly after completing The Boss Of It All, his 2006 low-key Danish-language comedy that took him back to his roots after a series of star-studded efforts. "I believe that a depression is a little bit of the mind's time out," he says. "If you have a lot of fear and anxiety, at a certain point, the mind says 'Enough is enough', and then you go down into this state where you look into a wall."
And there's no question that Von Trier has a lot of fear and anxiety. Among his multiple phobias, his fear of flying means every time he makes a pilgrimage to Cannes film festival, he drives for five days from Denmark in a battered old camper van.
This time, he arrived with the festival's most talked-about film, Antichrist. Despite Cannes being his spiritual home – he won the Palme d'Or there in 2000 for his musical Dancer In The Dark, starring Björk – the film's first press screening caused uproar, a mix of jeers and nervous laughter. Billed as Von Trier's attempt at gothic horror, the film sees Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg retreat to a cabin in the woods to heal their psychological wounds after their young son fell to his death from an open window. What follows is a gruelling odyssey, as Gainsbourg's unnamed mother becomes increasingly hysterical, turning on her husband – and herself – in a brutal last half-hour.
In the press kit, in what he called the "director's confession", Von Trier dubs Antichrist "the most important film of my entire career". The reason is quite simple: his depression had left him unable to work. Six months into his illness, he wrote a script as a cathartic exercise – "as a test to see if I would ever make another film". Still, he was listless, completing the screenplay with little enthusiasm, adding scenes and images – often culled from dreams – with no concern for logic. Dubbing it "a glimpse into the dark world of my imagination, into the nature of my fears", what spilled out onto the page was anything but pretty.
Ironically, the end result is one of Von Trier's most style-conscious films since the days of his early works Europa and The Element Of Crime. Take the bravura opening black-and-white sequence as Dafoe and Gainsbourg copulate in slow motion. It's a far cry from the back-to-basics aesthetic of his Dogme95 manifesto, when Von Trier (who made 1997's The Idiots under its so-called Vow of Chastity) urged filmmakers to shoot films on handheld cameras in natural lighting with no special effects.
Nevertheless, Von Trier, who wanted to merge a documentary-like style with more "monumental" shots, was unhappy with the end results. "I don't think I really succeeded," he moans.
The closest we get to a laugh in Antichrist is when a fox – eating its own entrails no less – turns to the camera and repeats Von Trier's office door slogan, "Chaos Reigns". "As you know, I work very much from humour," he says. "And we know that this (a talking fox] is a horror killer, but on the other hand, the fox demanded a line – so what can you do?"
By the time Von Trier arrived in Cannes – infuriating one Daily Mail journalist in the press conference by refusing to justify the film and instead proclaiming himself "the best director in the world" – chaos did reign. When the film premiered, he left the screening without waiting to receive the applause. "I'm not a stable person," he shrugs. "I felt quite a lot of hostility in the room, and then a stupid little thing (happened] like a light didn't go on, and we had to sit there for seven minutes and wait for an endless time. I'm normally a very friendly man but at a certain point I couldn't take it anymore. Then someone said, 'People are clapping. If you go, it's an insult to them.' And that was enough. I was off!"
With the film proposing that Gainsbourg's character is the embodiment of the Antichrist, it once again raises the age-old accusations that Von Trier is a misogynist. Just recall Dogville and Manderlay – the first two parts of his as-yet-incomplete USA trilogy – and the punishments handed out to the character of Grace, played respectively by Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard. Certainly, a brief glance at Von Trier's private life hints at where his problems stem from. Back in 1995 his mother made a deathbed confession that her late husband was not Von Trier's biological father. Within a year he divorced his first wife and converted to Catholicism (hitherto believing he was Jewish).
So what made him see woman as the Antichrist? "I am probably not very religious," he explains. "It's very obvious to me that religion is something that's invented by man. So suddenly I saw that the Antichrist would be the woman because she wouldn't accept the religion that was so typically manmade." He's increasingly come to believe he's an atheist, he says. "I can't be honest and say to my children (he has four], 'There is a God.' It's not possible." He lets out a long sigh. "I think you can say that I'm a pessimist. It's the only thing that has come out of all these years of therapy."
It's there for all to see in Antichrist, a Freudian fairytale that's arguably saved Von Trier. Did he accomplish what he set out to achieve? "It's a good question," he says, "but I don't know. Because of this mental illness, I was not expecting so much. I was just trying very hard to be there physically and finish the film." With no idea what his next film will be, I'm left with the impression that he still has a long way to go before he's better. Certainly, the vitriolic reaction to Antichrist in Cannes has shaken him. No wonder he stops short of saying that filmmaking is always therapeutic. "That would be too easy," he says. "Then I would be really, really healthy after all these films."
• Antichrist is released 24 July
www.antichristthemovie.com