James Caan vs Lars Von Trier: the “fucking wacko” director “riding roughshod” over his cast
When you take an actor who spent their career refusing to take shit from anyone and pair them with a director who never plays by the rules, sparks are almost guaranteed to fly. Sure enough, James Caan and Lars Von Trier did not part ways as the best of friends.
In all honesty, they were a strange match to begin with. Caan was the hard-headed and outspoken ‘New Hollywood’ favourite who turned down several iconic roles in favour of testing himself as an actor, which didn’t turn out as he’d liked when he never quite managed to break into the leading man bracket.
Decades later, Von Trier made controversy his business, frequently running afoul of collaborators and censors with his boundary-pushing movies and abrasive personality. Caan had hardly mellowed with age, and the Dogme man only became increasingly off-kilter, so it was a powder keg from the start.
By all accounts, Dogville was a tough shoot. The arthouse drama stripped away everything that the cast had become familiar with during their careers, and the star-studded ensemble seemed thrilled to take part, with Von Trier gathering Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Chloë Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgård, and more.
When asked for his recollections of the production, Caan described the auteur in a way that’s hardly dissimilar from what he’s become accustomed to. “Oh, he’s a fucking wacko,” the Godfather alum told The Independent, with Von Trier picking him up from the airport in a banger of an old van to drive him to the set.
As one of the veteran contingent, alongside the likes of Bacall, Ben Gazzara, and Philip Baker Hall, Caan shared that the elder statesmen weren’t treated particularly nicely during production. “He was riding roughshod over them,” he shared. “I mean, bad.” He wasn’t directly on the receiving end, though, which may have had something to do with his reputation for standing up for himself against tyrants.
For his big scene in the back of a Cadillac, he found himself isolated, alone, and increasingly irritated. “I’m sitting in the back of this thing for hours,” he reflected. “Smoking a cigarette in this silly outfit.” When Von Trier and Kidman had done their part, they promptly fucked off, leaving Caan to sit there wondering what he was supposed to do next, for “literally three or four hours more.”
In fact, Caan had such a fun time working on Dogville that Von Trier nicknamed him ‘Laughing Boy’, which you’ve got to assume is at least slightly ironic. Not many of the names involved with the film were expecting it to be a barrel of laughs, and Paul Bettany was even duped into making it by Skarsgård, so it did live up to its billing on that front.
Caan never seemed like the kind of guy who’d get a kick out of making a pretentious Euro-drama, and based on his not-so-fond recollections of the experience, it would appear that he didn’t.
