 
The Village Voice, 17 March 2004
Performance Anxiety
by Dennis Lim
Paul Bettany explains the method in his director-tormentor's madness
"He's Jackson Pollock and you're mixing colors for him," says Dogville star Paul Bettany of Lars von Trier's notoriously eccentric—some might say sadistic—approach to directing actors. "He won't let you talk to him or to the other actors about the scene or about your character. There's no rehearsal. You learn your lines, you come in, and he starts filming. It's a very odd process—for the actor, there's nothing cerebral about it."
Nicole Kidman takes on the customary von Trier role of the transfigured female victim (the dog who, for a change, turns out to have a ferocious bite), but Bettany's precisely drawn Tom Edison Jr., a soft-spoken would-be writer responsible for the narrative's most craven and tortuously self-justified betrayal, may be Dogville's most revealing character—not least if considered as an authorial alter ego. "On some level, Lars is obsessed with being a coward and a fraud," says Bettany. "He thinks it's brave." Most recently seen as an unchaste priest turned traveling player in the medieval drama The Reckoning (currently in theaters) and as Master and Commander's sensitive medic-cellist-naturalist, Bettany says the Dogville shoot was a trial from the outset.
Blithely unconcerned that the British actor was attempting an American accent in a lead role for the first time, von Trier refused to hire a voice coach. "We had a huge fight," says Bettany, "but Lars didn't care and wouldn't pay for it." (Bettany resorted to borrowing Kidman's: "My accent gets better through the movie.") What's more, director and actors didn't always see eye to eye on the material: "[Dogville co-star] Stellan Skarsgard, who's merciless with Lars, would tell him, 'You think all your films are comedies, and nobody ever fucking laughs.' " And there was also von Trier's arbitrary, often hostile direction to get used to. "He'd just go: 'Shout it! Now do nothing—nothing! Oh Paul, you're a terrible actor, down 200 percent. You're ruining my film!' "
With a bare, wall-less soundstage standing in for a Rocky Mountain village, most of Dogville's motley ensemble—which also includes Ben Gazzara, Lauren Bacall, Chloë Sevigny, and Patricia Clarkson—were on set almost continuously throughout production. "Can you imagine the pressure of doing a scene with Nicole while Lauren Bacall is in the background sweeping up?" Von Trier also enforced commune-like conditions off-set: "Lars made everybody live in the same hotel. We were in this awful fucking town, Trollhattan, which means 'troll hat,' where this troll once threw his hat off and it broke down these cliffs and the water rushed in and they were able to build a Saab factory. There's nothing to do—we drank together in the hotel bar at night, and went to work together in the morning. And Lars's presence was constant. He's such a control freak. If he could, he would've bugged every room in the hotel just to hear what you were saying about him." Certainly, some of the director's mind games were more peculiar than others. "Once there was a knock on my door at three in the morning," recalls Bettany. "I open it and it's Lars, naked in the hallway. I say 'Lars, what d'you fuckin' want?' and he goes 'I want a pair of underpants.'"
But Bettany says that when the cameras were rolling, von Trier's experimental prodding did eventually yield results. "You shoot one scene a day for 10 hours, and you've done it every which way—with the script, making up your own words, with your jacket on, your jacket off, because Lars doesn't care about continuity. It's hard to stay self-conscious that long. You get bored being self-conscious. You have to completely yield to him—I wish I'd yielded earlier. The only thing he wants you to receive from it is the childlike fun of getting lost in another person."
Despite his emerging Hollywood reputation (he's married to his Oscar-winning Beautiful Mind co-star Jennifer Connelly), Bettany is candid about his distaste for most aspects of the industry. Ask what he's worked on since wrapping Wimbledon, the upcoming tennis romance with Kirsten Dunst, and he retorts, "I've worked on running around the world making money for Rupert Murdoch"—referring to his junket tour of duty for Fox's Master and Commander. He says he dislikes most of the scripts he reads (one he's keen on is an adaptation of Philip Roth's American Pastoral; the trades have reported that Bettany and Connelly are attached to star, with Phillip Noyce directing), and that he hates it when actors discuss their "craft": "Acting is a lot like sex—it's quite fun to do and really embarrassing to talk about afterwards."
Still, he concedes that at the core of his Dogville experience was a perverse but valuable lesson on acting: "At the end of The Score, there's a scene where Marlon Brando's smiling. But Brando had refused to smile—it was a stand-off, so they shot it and CGI'd a smile in. And that's fucking Marlon Brando. The illusion that you have any control as an actor, that you're crafting a performance, is exactly that—it's illusory. All Lars really does is rob you of that illusion, and that's quite comforting."
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The Daily Yomiuri (Japan), 19 February 2004
Von Trier: Genius or madman?
by Shogo Hagiwara
Is director Lars von Trier a revolutionary? Or is he just a psycho messing around with what he may well claim to be a new methodology of filmmaking? The answer will vary wildly depending on how you view his works. But whatever your opinion may be, it is difficult to claim that the Danish experimentalist is intent on sitting still. On the contrary, he seems to try his hand at a different style of film each time he directs.
The Idiots (1998), a look into a group of people who pretend to be mentally or physically challenged, was shot according to the Dogme manifesto that calls for the use of hand-held cameras and natural light. For Dancer in the Dark (2000), he used a kind of musical format as a platform for telling a story that many interpret as a critique of capital punishment.
Each foray by von Trier in a new direction causes a stir, but Dogville is probably his most ambitious project to date. Firstly, the film is entirely shot on what seems to be a performing stage (a filmed stage show would be a more accurate description of the production). The layout of the town Dogville--located, we are told, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains--is only sketched out on the floor in white lines. This means the houses are only conceptual, so when an actor opens a door to enter a "house," for instance, he or she just pretends to do so by moving a hand in the air as if a door is actually there and everybody can see it.
Secondly the entire story is divided into a prologue and nine chapters, and at the beginning of each segment, we are told by a narrator (John Hurt) what is about to take place in the scene that follows.
After the prologue introduces us to the people in Dogville, a small, quiet town of 23 residents and one dog, the story is set in motion. We first see a beautiful woman named Grace (Nicole Kidman), pursued by gangsters, enter the town. Upon hearing gunshots in the distance, Tom Edison (Paul Bettany) ventures out of his house and meets a frightened Grace in the street. Sensing she is in great danger, he offers her shelter.
Completely separated from the outside world, the residents of Dogville are very conservative in many ways. They are at first reluctant to harbor Grace, but with Tom's persuasive backing, all the residents eventually permit her to stay in the town. In exchange, though, they stipulate a condition: she must help each resident with whatever job she is asked to do, from baby-sitting to harvesting.
The townspeople initially treat Grace nicely, but after they learn that the police are after her, they come to demand more of her in exchange for not reporting her to the authorities. No matter how innocent they may look, dark shadows of desire emerge in their minds and their demands become increasingly unreasonable and absurd. Grace finds herself becoming little more than a slave for them: She is sexually exploited by men and falls prey to all manner of abuse from the women.
One can see Dogville as von Trier's response to criticism he received upon the release of Dancer in the Dark. With that film, he was criticized for making a movie about a country he'd never set foot in--the United States (he has a fear of flying). It may have been that he set this film in the United States once again to show he wouldn't be intimidated in the face of such criticism (he once was quoted as saying: "I know more about America via various media than the Americans knew about Morocco when they filmed Casablanca").
Whatever the reason, it would be wrong if one were to trivialize yet another masterpiece from the Danish director by labeling it anti-American, as part of the press did at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where the film was hugely popular but went home empty-handed.
In fact, the film seems to be more about von Trier's interest in the human condition in which innocent, harmless souls turn into villains in ways they could never imagine. Von Trier depicts the transformation of the seemingly innocent townspeople of Dogville in a chillingly telling fashion.
Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours last year, puts on yet another superb performance here as Grace, whose selfless character makes her an easy target for abuse in the town.
Bettany is in excellent form, too. But his performance seems all the more remarkable given the stress he was put under during the shoot. As seen in the "making of" movie of Dogville titled Dogville Confessions, which will also open this weekend in selected cinemas, the British actor shows intense frustration at von Trier's direction, which seems to him to be more of a standard suited to a film student's workshop. He keeps insisting that he wants to go back to London.
If Bettany was asked if he thought von Trier was a revolutionary or a psycho, it seems almost certain that his answer would be the latter.
~~*~~
The Miami Herald, 6 February 2004
Von Trier's biting analysis of cruelty
by Rene Rodriguez
If Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves) weren't already known as contemporary movies' most mischievous provocateur, then his latest film, Dogville, would make it official. Intentionally designed to rile as much as entertain, the movie initially appears to be another variation on Von Trier's favorite premise: An innocent, saintly woman is unjustly persecuted and made to suffer for her perceived sins.
But in Dogville, Von Trier adds a malicious wrinkle to the formula that deepens its sadistic streak and satirizes its melodramatic undertones. This time, the martyr-in-the-making is Grace (Nicole Kidman), a mysterious woman on the run from gangsters who hides out in a Depression-era mining town in Colorado. An eternal optimist who always believes the best in people, Grace thinks of the drab, tiny village as a beautiful place of hope and dreams. But as one of its most bitter residents ominously warns her, "This town is rotten from the inside out."
The bulk of Dogville, which runs three admittedly grueling hours, tracks how the townspeople go from begrudgingly accepting Grace into their midst to exploiting and abusing her in the cruelest ways imaginable. Played by a formidable ensemble cast that includes Patricia Clarkson, Paul Bettany, Chloe Sevigny and Lauren Bacall, the ''good and honest'' people of Dogville form a close-knit community that prides itself on decency and order, but is quick to surrender to its worst impulses the moment they are deemed socially acceptable. Von Trier's misanthropism never has felt more devastating nor absolute.
A former advocate of the Dogme 95 film movement (which championed naturalistic filmmaking with no artificial lights or sounds), Von Trier goes the opposite route in Dogville. Shot entirely on a nearly bare soundstage, with chalk outlines representing buildings and characters opening and closing imaginary doors, Dogville revels in its blatant artifice (at times, Von Trier even shoots the action from high overhead, making the set look like a giant Monopoly board). The folksy voice-over narration (read by John Hurt) is meant to invoke Our Town, but the film's Brechtian theatricality is a constant reminder that Dogville demands to be interpreted and analyzed.
Some viewers at last year's Cannes Film Festival read Dogville as an anti-American tract, compounded by Von Trier's decision to show over the end credits a series of photographs depicting this country's disenfranchised classes over several decades, pointedly scored to David Bowie's Young Americans. But hypocrisy, arrogance, intellectualism and the abuse of power aren't exclusive to any particular country. Maddening, challenging and audacious, Dogville is an unlikely masterpiece.
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