Kirsten Dunst may have had a 22-year career and have made close to 40 movies before her 30th birthday, but her role in Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" has taken her into new territory.
It's a bold, strange, apocalyptic story from the celebrated and controversial Danish auteur of outrage, a vision of depression and cataclysm from a director who then found himself barred from the Cannes Film Festival for joking a little too strenuously about Hitler.
Dunst was sitting next to von Trier at the press conference when he made the remarks, cringing as he self-destructed -- but then going on to win the Best Actress award at the festival.
She certainly deserves Oscar consideration as well for the film, in which her young bride Justine spends the first half of the film wracked with crippling depression, and the second half calmly accepting a fate (an enormous planet that may be on a collision course with Earth) that is causing everyone around her to panic.
Also read: 'Melancholia': The Lars von Trier Movie for People Who Hate Lars von Trier Movies
The film has been making the festival rounds since Cannes, landing this week at the AFI Fest and opening in limited release this weekend. It has also been on VOD for a month, though a small screen can hardly do justice to the terrifying grandeur of von Trier's vision.
Were you able to enjoy the experience at Cannes, or did von Triers' shenanigans cast a pall over it?
I could enjoy it, because I was proud of the film. I was embarrassed for him and what he did, but so was he, and he apologized. And he didn’t mean that. He says provocative things. He was very inappropriate. But we're talking about Lars von Trier here. He says the weirdest stuff all the time.
When he's not in the public, does he come out with weird, provocative things for the sake of it?
He’ll say weird things to people or in conversation. And he's nervous in front of press. I remember when he was posing in Cannes. He had gotten a tattoo [on his knuckles] that said "FUCK," and he was holding it out, but literally his hand was shaking when he was posing for pictures. This is the Lars that people don’t know. He's doing these provocative things, but also he's nervous wreck up there.
Have you stayed in touch?
Of course. I texted him the other day. I miss him. I loved working with him. I think we'll do it again. Not the next one, but maybe the one after.
Also read: Cannes Blasts Lars von Trier for Joking About Nazis; Filmmaker Apologizes
Didn’t he say that his next movie is going to be pornographic?
Yeah.
