Danish director Lars Von Trier’s ambitious new project, “Melancholia,” is a psychological drama disaster picture with sci-fi-ish elements – it’s essentially about an enormous planet that evidently looms threateningly close to Earth and fucks shit up. So it’s a global disaster movie, but surely it’s nothing like “2012” (and thank god for that).
Last we heard the European shoot is scheduled for sometime in 2010, but recent comments Von Trier made to the A/V Club suggest the picture might be delayed? Or possibly he has to turn in the script at a certain date and he thinks he may miss it? His comments are unclear.
AVC: What can you say about Planet Melancholia, your recently announced science-fiction feature?
LVT: That I feel melancholic about it. [Laughs.]
AVC: You’re already not feeling good?
LVT: Very melancholic. And I’m in doubt if I can do it in time, but I’m working on it, and I’m using my own melancholia to fill it out with, so we’ll see. I kind of like the idea. Let’s see what happens.
Von Trier is not only prone to hyperbole, he’s also known for his mischievous deceptions. He’s said in recent interviews that he exacerbated how depressed he was on the set of “Antichrist” so it would be easier for him to get what he wanted out of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. At the same time several interviews from Dafoe and Gainsbourg suggest he was indeed chronically depressed and sometimes would stop production during the day so he could take a nap and lie down. Either way, he seems to be prone to despair and hopelessness in certain comments. So should we worry? Maybe a little, but we see no need for alarm just yet.
Bonus credit. Did you know that Eva Green was initially pegged to star in “Antichrist” instead of Charlotte Gainsbourg? We read some press in Cannes about Green being difficult or objecting to some of the material, but we can’t remember any particular quotes, so we’ll leave it at that. In this interview all Von Trier says is, “We had a longer discussion with Eva Green and her agent, but we never really agreed.”
Also in our last “Melancholia,” piece we failed to mention Lars Von Trier’s dystopian and very stylized, “The Element Of Crime,” as an example of a sci-fi-ish LVT film that’s not really traditional sci-fi. It’s quite excellent (1984, very early) and you should definitely see it if you haven’t already.