"Well yeah, you could see my face. I was choking, because I'm watching a friend having a meltdown. And what he's saying is horrendous in a roomful of press. He was asked an inappropriate question [about his family] and his response was to make a joke about it. But no one laughed and he just kept unravelling." Kirsten Dunst told her side of the Lars von Trier Cannes controversy to The Guardian recently, wondering why none of her fellow Melancholia co-stars stepped in to stop their director from shoving his foot squarely into his own mouth.
"That's what I don't understand," Dunst continued to The Guardian. "There were a lot of us sitting there. There was Stellan [Skarsgård], John [Hurt], Charlotte [Gainsbourg]. And no one said something. No one wanted to help. I was the only one to lean in to Lars and get him to stop."
Granted, the look on Dunst's face was a comic highlight of the proceedings last May, when von Trier made one of the most poorly-conceived jokes ever spoken at a press junket. (The upside: It yielded months and months of amusing press coverage!)
Before I send you to the full Guardian interview for more of Dunsts's musings, there's also this gem of a quote from Dunst on Melancholia co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg and her other von Trier movie Antichrist, which perhaps unintentionally leads to quite a vivid mental picture:
"That kind of film is harder for someone like me to get away with. I'm more in the public eye than Charlotte." She pauses to reconsider. "It's something about Charlotte's body, too. You couldn't have someone like me, with big breasts, in that film. Charlotte's thin and her breasts are small and that's easier to watch somehow. For someone like me to do that film -- it would almost be ridiculously shocking."
And thus, Kirsten Dunst breaks her silence over the Nazi kerfuffle with boobs. A master of deflection, this one. I think this calls for an Antichrist-Melancholia double feature! For research purposes, of course.
• Kirsten Dunst: after the apocalypse [The Guardian]