Lars Trier Quotes (43 Quotes)

I don't worship Catholicism for Catholicism's own sake. I have felt the need to experience a sense of belonging with a religious community, because my parents were convinced atheists.

I kind of have to see it through to the end, don't I But at the same time it's also rather dull doing something for the second time, I must admit. I've never made anything twice in my life.

When we later cut down the scenes, our only thought was to increase the intensity in the performance, without regard as to whether the image is in focus.

I'm much calmer. We had a lot of time problems going to Cannes. The print was ready one day before it was shown. Now I feel very good.

I had to fight so much for the film. It was not very pleasant, but it's rewarding in another way. But it has not been pleasant.

We had shot very long scenes, and no scene was like the other. The actors were allowed to move within the scene as they pleased, and they never needed to follow any determined action.

The last year has been more full of fear than ever before... but on the personal level, each of my films is a little monument.

Perhaps it sounds pretentious, but in one way or another I hope that you can see that every image contains an idea. It certainly sounds presumptuous-and perhaps it's also untruthful. But as I see it, every image and every cut is thought out. They are not there by chance.

Its very exciting to be introduced to some movies by Matthew about objects like architecture...but Im more of a typical woman, I like feelings.

In the earlier films, it was a conscious decision not to be too close to the actors.

If you tell a man what to do in real life, to which extent is it reality and to which extent are you in control

I also wanted t do a film with a religious motif, a film about miracles. At the same time, I wanted to do a completely naturalistic film.

This way of working with actors that I have found now is normally a great pleasure, because it means giving a lot of freedom to some people-and to see them enjoy that freedom and to give to the project is usually very nice.

I've taken the circuitous path of being interested in people.

In many ways I also have an understanding for-or rather, that people are engaged by spiritual questions and that they are so in an extreme manner. It is just that, if you want to create a melodrama, you have to furnish it with certain obstacles.

It felt important to find some actors who really had the enthusiasm to participate. And I think it feels as if the heart is in it among those we finally chose.

My transgression, which I have confessed to countless times, that I used stand-ins in the sex-scene is also of a grave nature because it was essential for me to include that effect. Again this means that you are manipulating-that you want to control things.

The risk is that you furnish the project with new suggestions to try and freshen it up it's not always beneficial. You risk betraying the original intention with the story, forgetting what it is you really want to portray.

Visible good easily becomes trite visually there is very little material left-you know, you make a sunbeam pass over a character or a situation and it becomes far too pathetic and banal.

But if it means that people who used to be limited by a notion of how a proper film should be, if those people now feel that they can make film-then I find that has a certain quality to it.

I have maneuvered my way through four or five different types of cancer that I completely succumbed to. It's amazing how many probable types of cancer can arise when hypochondria permits.

Reproduction is a little stupid. You have to put a little something in. It's like in the church you pay a little money to the tithe.

In the forest scene we had put a mike up a tree to capture the ambient sound... it is like reinventing movie-making, don't you see

If you go on correcting a script, you may lose your enthusiasm. It almost happened in this process, too, when we spent ages changing scenes and moving back and forth but in the end we returned to the original, and the final version of the film is very close to the script.

Before, I worked with a storyboard, and that meant that the image wasn't good. There was a lot of things that you had to live up to.

It should all come from the main character's idea that life is beautiful anywhere. It doesn't have to be light with spotlights and blue lights and slow motion or whatever, life is great anyway.

Opera is more like melodrama. And the good thing about opera is that if you can accept that people sing instead of talk, then you don't have to go in and out of it. And that means you can have your emotions with you.

The rule means-as I interpret it-that you are allowed to do nothing with the sound and picture after shooting sound and picture hang together, and neither may be changed or moved afterwards.

I also have scenes with music in them, and we have recorded the music on location-a bit like the first talk movies.

One morning I greeted the cast naked in the front drive and insisted that today was to be a nude day. No, we didn't have any nudity problems.

I encouraged the cast to make up their own lines.

I give myself a task. This time, the task was to do a musical.

You either go to Tibet or seek out the most rigorous of all faiths. With total abstinence and such like.

It's... a matter of making the actors responsible for their characters, so if they felt that their character would read a Donald Duck magazine, they would bring one themselves.

It would be difficult to avoid breathing here in life. It's a contradiction in terms, because no matter what choice you make, it's dramaturgy. Dogma 95 contains a few impossible, paradoxical rules, but the same goes for religious dogmas, too.

I'd toyed with a couple of ideas beforehand, but I hadn't written a single cue, and it was a wonderful feeling to just write away.

The essence of my dramaturgical considerations is that I want to chuck out the most superfluous, habitual constraints and escape from rigidity, but at the same time film is a means of communication.

We had to turn up the colors in the dance sequences to make people feel that there were different levels of the film. I was not so fond of that, because it made the dancing more glamorous in a superficial way than what I really wanted, but it was necessary for the understanding of the two levels.

I enjoy dialogue that leads to something more comical, and at the same time I like the added poignancy, too.

For me as a director, it is extremely fun trying to add the music on the spot. Especially the moment when the music sets in and the emotional chords are engaged, is a very important means of expression.

If Breaking the Waves had been rendered with a conventional technique, I don't think you could have tolerated the story.

It was fun having a musician on the set and then having to communicate with him-it was a completely new discipline which I found interesting.

I'm moving to a new house. I moved away from where I was born. I lived there for 44 years, so I just moved. So I'm actually trying to grow up. And I got myself a sports car, that's fantastic, an Alfa Romeo Spider. It's a two-seater. I have four children. I feel like I'm 18 years old.