Zentropa
Listen, forget the news you heard last week about Lars von Trier delving into a new genre to explore for his next project – that’s old news. This is new news, kid. We received word (via director Kristian Levering) that the Danish filmmaker will, yes, be tackling the world of horror next because his mind is a complex layer of fantastical nightmares that probably works not unlike that murder turducken on Hannibal where the lady was sewn in a horse and crows were sewn in the lady. But yes, von Trier is supposedly writing a spooky scary movie set in Detroit for Levering to direct, and if you though Antichrist was terrifying…well, buddy, apparently the world is just a horrible place that we’re all going to have to slog through together, hand in hand.
True to von Trier’s word after the 2011 Cannes Film Festival to never speak to the press again about his plans or ideas (after he said he sympathized with Hitler, that old chestnut), a middle man in the form of producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen announced to Screen Daily that the filmmaker had another project lined up, in another unexplored genre: Action. Or rather, “he is talking about making a Trier version of an action movie.”
Now, the “von Trier version” of an action movie is a puzzling concept, but rather intriguing. According to Jenson, this one is for von Trier to direct himself, but that’s about all we’re getting at this time. Now, it’s safe to say that when see this addition to the action genre sometime in the near future, it’s not going to be something like The Expendables. It could be like The Expendables, in theory, but the aging men would be shot in much grainier close-ups and be wearing far less clothing. They would kiss. Then serve justice.
The fact is, with von Trier, any genre is taken and bent and misshapen and twisted and reimagined, much like Willem Dafoe’s genitals in Antichrist. We’re definitely not getting a straight, by the books action movie, but something that takes the tropes of the genre and reinterprets it into something that could be beautiful, and as always, feature a little pinch of his signature bizzaro von Trier flavor.
We’ve already seen him feature action sequences in Melancholia, where chaos and apocalypse rain down upon the earth, and again in Antichrist, where a husband and wife do battle with the help of nature’s forces of evil, and with The Kingdom, his Danish miniseries where the dead mingled in a damned hospital.
So if the man thinks he hasn’t done action yet, it’s going to be pretty damn exciting see what he comes up with next.
