Von Trier: “I am the best film director in the world”

“I enjoyed making it,” Von Trier responded quietly, pausing and seeming just slightly flustered.

“I don’t have very much to say,” Von Trier continued, “I think its a very strange question that I have to defend myself. I don’t feel that. You are all my guests, it’s not the other way around, that’s how I feel.”

“I work for myself,” Von Trier added, “I haven’t done it for you or for an audience. I don’t think I owe anybody an explanation.”

The genital mutilation scenes in the film are the ones that most who’ve seen the movie will likely discuss, debate or simply laugh at, as was the case after last night’s screening. “We could only shoot it once, you know,” Von Trier deadpanned, garnering even more laughs, when asked why he included such graphic imagery. “For me, not to show it would be lying as this is a very dark dream about guilt and sex and stuff. It came in naturally.”

Von Trier has explained that “Antichrist” came out of a two year period of depression that he faced in which everything seemed unimportant to him. “Six months later, just as an exercise, I wrote a script,” Von Trier explained, in a letter that is included in the press kit for the movie (reprinted on the subsequent page here). “It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if I would ever make another film.”

“I would like to invite you for a tiny glimpse behind the curtain,” he writes in the notes, “A glimpse into the dark world of my imagination: into the nature of my fears, into the nature of Antichrist.” He calls the the movie, “The most important film of my entire career.”

Asked later how or if this film brought him harmony, Von Trier seemed a bit confused, but explained, “Its more the routine of making a film that is therapy, the routine of getting up every day and going to work and that helps.”
Pressed to react to the journalist’s negative reactions to his new movie, again Von Trier remained steady. “I have been treated badly by the press before, I like that…its a good start for a discussion, you know, that you feel something about the project.”

And, given the strong reactions to the movie already, how will he distribute it, another journalist answered. “That’s something I have not though about,” Von Trier replied simply.

“I dont believe in thinking about audience when you do a film, so maybe it wil be a catastrophe.”