In an interview with the Telegraph in support of Antichrist, which opens in the U.K. this Friday, Charlotte Gainsbourg discussed some of the on-the-job hazards that come with working on a Lars Von Trier film. For starters, you might find yourself on the receiving end of a Moon Von Trier at any given moment. What's more, you might not hear every film actor's favorite words -- "Cut, print, BRILLIANT WORK. Let's call it a day everyone, drinks on me!" -- until you nail the scene in which your eyeballs are nearly choked right out of their sockets:
"Of course, Lars has a way of being provocative," she says, airily. "You can see that he enjoys that. But it's like a child wanting to..." She allows the sentence to tail off, smiles coyly, then starts again. "Well, Lars does like to show his bottom now and then." Did he show it to her? "Yes he did," she says, giggling, "shortly before we started to shoot, just to make me feel more comfortable." [...]
"Of course, the strangling scene was also very painful," she adds, referring to a moment in the film where Dafoe shoves her against a wall and presses his hands into her throat until the veins in her neck stand out and her eyes bulge alarmingly. "That felt like a very long struggle for me. And that is where, for the first time, I saw a little glimpse of pleasure in Lars's eyes." She laughs again suddenly, girlishly. "I wasn't sure I wanted to see that. At the end of it Lars came up to me and said: 'I know you feel very bad, Charlotte. But all my actors always feel like that'."
Indeed, no one knows that better than Icelandic pop provocateur Björk, who was famously subjected at the director's insistence to what's known in the snuff-film industry as a "soft hanging" -- lending his Dancer in the Dark climax the look and feel of a genuine execution, but resulting only in some light neck bruising and 30-seconds of complete unconsciousness for his fully committed star.
· Charlotte Gainsbourg interview for Antichrist [Telegraph]