Willem Dafoe’s strange relationship with Lars Von Trier: “I know things about his sex life”
Lars Von Trier is one of the strangest people working in the industry, with a disturbing style that gets under your skin and burns into your brain, sometimes leaving you wishing that you’d never seen it at all.
The director always seems to employ the biggest A-list actors to take part in his dark tales, whether it be Nicole Kidman’s infamous role in Dogville, in which she is tortured by a group of villagers and forced to wear a dog collar, or Kirsten Dunst’s part in Melancholia as a depressed woman who is unperturbed by the looming arrival of a comet that is crashing towards Earth.
But perhaps the most fitting of his collaborations came when working with fellow independent weirdo Willem Dafoe, who is similarly eccentric in his cinematic taste after working with everyone from Robert Eggers, Yorgos Lanthimos and David Lynch. And as a result, the pair grew very close very quickly, forming a unique working relationship that perhaps reflected the uncomfortable subject matter of the films he starred in.
Nymphomaniac and Antichrist are two of the most deranged works in Trier’s filmography, with the former following a sex obsessed woman and the latter, a grieving couple who retreat to their cabin in the woods only to be plagued by something much worse, with Dafoe’s character having his testicles crushed by a block of wood. It’s not a fate you would willingly submit yourself to, but the actor placed an enormous amount of trust in the director and his vision, knowing that whatever it was he wanted, would pay off.
Dafoe had been a huge fan of work since the very beginning, with Trier developing a nihilistic tone from the beginning and often shining a light on the worst aspects of human nature, revealing just how self-motivated and awful we can be during times of dire need and crisis.
While some people might be put off by the idea of working with him due to the darkness of his ideas, leading his actors to places most people would never dream of going, Dafoe was eager to realise his twisted fantasies, saying, “I like his company. I like his work and what he proposed to me was an interesting project. But there are some people that I’d work with on almost anything if I could see that I could make a contribution and they needed me. And I felt like Lars needed me for that project”.
When describing the dynamic the pair have cultivated and how this informed their work, he said, “Personally, it’s very intimate, like I know things about his sex life. Lars loves to talk about these things”. It’s hardly surprising that he divulged these details, given the frankness of Nymphomaniac, with a blunt tone that captures sexual encounters in a detached and completely unemotional way.
The director presumably had many conversations of this nature with his actors while creating his anti-romance movie, undoubtedly traumatising all audience members in the process, but inevitably accelerating his unique bonding process with Dafoe.
