In this short video Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier shares his admiration for the Twin Peaks TV series and tells a funny story of a failed meeting with its director, David Lynch.
Lars von Trier was inspired by David Lynch’s series ‘Twin Peaks’ when making The Kingdom (1994). What fascinates Trier about Twin Peaks is how it is told and never reveals an overall meaning behind the events going on in the series. “It’s based on the assumption that you expect all these peculiar things happening at the end will lead to a greater meaning. He (David Lynch, red.) never intended that,” Trier says. Lynch “tried to finish it both with a feature film and another series but it was never his intention, he’s made it a point that it doesn’t come together in the end,” von Trier states. “The funniest thing is to tease and not reach a conclusion.”
When Trier was invited to meet David Lynch at the Film School in Copenhagen, he sees Lynch sitting in a room “with a couple of suits who looked like Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Trier decides to hide in a nearby office under the desk table, where he stayed laying on the floor for an hour: Afterwards, Lars von Trier manages to escape unseen. “I can’t take seeing the alliance between something that I admire this much and something I admire this little,” he says.
Lars von Trier (b.1956) is a Danish film director and screenwriter, whose prolific career spans almost four decades. His pivotal work is known for its technical innovation and examination of existential, social, and political issues in movies such as ‘The Element of Crime’ (1984), ‘Europa’ (1991), ‘Breaking the Waves’ (1996), ‘The Idiots’ (1998), ‘Dancer in the Dark’ (2000), ‘Dogville’ (2003), ‘Antichrist’ (2009), ‘Melancholia’ (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013) and ‘The House That Jack Built’ (2018). He is also the creator of the TV series ‘The Kingdom’ (1994-1997) and one of the creators of the innovative Dogma 95 style manifesto (along with e.g. Thomas Vinterberg), which has since marked Danish and European film alike. Among his numerous awards at film festivals worldwide, Trier has received the Palme d’Or, the Grand Prix, Prix du Jury, and The Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as The University of Copenhagen’s DKK 1 million Sonning Prize 2018. In 2018 Brandt Museum in Odense, Denmark presented a major exhibition providing a retrospective overview of the work of Trier: ‘Lars von Trier – The good with the evil’. Trier is also the founder and shareholder of the international film production company Zentropa Films. In 2022 Lars von Trier will release the third part of ‘The Kingdom’, entitled ‘The Kingdom Exodus’.
Lars von Trier was interviewed by Christian Lund at his home outside Copenhagen in November 2020.
Camera: Jakob Solbakken & Rasmus Quistgaard
Edit: Kasper Bech Dyg
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2020
Supported by Nordea-fonden
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