“My next film, and Kirsten [Dunst] demanded it, will be porn. That’s how women are. Really hard core. That’s what I’m writing now,” Lars von Trier told a Cannes Film Festival press conference back in 2011. We all had a good laugh, but here we are three years later with the director’s two part epic “Nymphomaniac” is already rolling out overseas and slated to open stateside this spring – and we weren’t the only ones who thought Lars was just fucking with us.
Continuing the promotional train, Zentropa Productions has unveiled the first official interview, a 12-minute conversation with Charlotte Gainsbourg, who plays the lead character Joe in the sex flick. The actress reveals that she too thought Lars was just being Lars when he announced the project. “The first time I heard anything, was [Lars] talking in Cannes, and I thought he was making a joke. We were doing an interview with Kirsten Dunst for ‘Melancholia,’ and he said, ‘My next film is a porn film with those two.’ [Laughs] I thought he was making fun, and it was quite funny,” she said. “And then much later on, I read the script.”
“I just thought it was a joke, and that it was a provocation,” Gainsbourg continued. “And I didn’t want to hope too much that he was going to ask. The big thing for me was that I was realizing he was asking me to do a third film, and it was such a blessing, and that’s the way I always thought about it. And I didn’t want to think about it too much in case it wasn’t true.”
Well it turned about to be true, with much of the talk around the film centering on its explicit, hardcore sex, much of it performed by porno body doubles. For Gainsbourg, that was crucial. “I was very, very nervous at first. I needed it to be very clear that actors were not going to perform sex. As long as that was clear, I was fine.”
The end result? We’ll soon find out. “Nymphomaniac: Part One” opens in theaters on March 21, 2014, and will be available On Demand starting March 6, 2014. “Nymphomaniac: Part Two” will open in theaters on April 18, 2014 and will be available On Demand as of April 3, 2014. Watch the full interview below.