“Get it off me!”: The director who “terrified” Nicole Kidman and the scene that almost broke her
Artists can often be very difficult, challenging people. When a filmmaker has an idea that is transgressive, there’s a 50/50 chance that they’re actually one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet, or they’re just as deranged and intense as you’d expect.
For Nicole Kidman, there was a certain filmmaker who had this dangerous allure, drawing her into his world despite the fact that it seemed murky and uncertain, like walking on a razor’s edge. She could get hurt at any moment. But Kidman has never been one to refuse a challenge, so she took on the leading role in Lars von Trier’s Dogville back in the early 2000s, even though he had quite the reputation as a controversial figure.
“Lars was Lars, and I was, like, terrified of him and drawn to him,” she told British GQ. It wasn’t going to be easy working with von Trier, but she went into the project knowing that she was likely going to have a strange experience. Art isn’t always going to be easy – or a pleasant time, for that matter.
So, taking on the role of a woman who hides out in a small town while on the run from mobsters, Kidman was immersed in a shooting experience unlike anything she’d ever done before. And she’d already worked with Stanley Kubrick. The movie used a minimal stage set-up to tell the story, with half-finished walls and white outlines creating an atmosphere of unease and artifice. This wasn’t the main challenge, though.
In one scene, she was required to wear a heavy metal collar, and this proved to be almost too much for the actor, who soon felt herself struggling against the prop while wanting to maintain a level of professionalism. “There’s the moment when they put this dog collar on me that was sort of a metal collar. And then we were filming and, I mean, it was so heavy and hard to get off,” she explained.
“I remember it being on and going [puts her hands to her neck]. And Lars thought I’m acting. And actually I’m like….[struggling to breathe].” The scene was almost a breaking point for Kidman, but she persevered, and Dogville became a monumental effort; to date, it’s one of her most impressive roles, in which she really utilised the confines of the set to her greatest potential.
Describing the experience of making the movie as “kind of dangerous and weird as well, at the same time,” Kidman seems proud to have been involved in a movie as daring, even if she was terrified of von Trier. “One day it would be a fairytale; the next it was a nightmare. Lars was gentle with me – he was gentle and soft, and then he would beat me up emotionally when he felt he needed that,” she once said.
The Danish filmmaker remains one of cinema’s most controversial directors, not least because he has made many shocking films like Antichrist, Nymphomaniac, and The House That Jack Built, all of which blend senseless violence with sexuality. He was also accused of sexual harassment by Björk, who starred in his film Dancer in the Dark, and he made a rather interesting remark in an interview in which he claimed to “understand Hitler”.
It’s understandable why Kidman described her experience as equally strange and scary, because if there’s anyone currently making movies who knows how to push boundaries – both on and off screen – it’s von Trier.
