As someone who’s generally not a Lars von Trier fan, I feel compelled to encourage everyone to toss aside your preconceptions and inhibitions and give Melancholia a shot. No, it’s still not your standard, straightforward Hollywood fare, but that’s what makes it such a unique and genuinely special experience and, after chatting with stars Kirsten Dunst, Alexander Skarsgård and Charlotte Gainsbourg, it seems as though von Trier’s unique way of working is what made creating Melancholia such a genuinely special experience for them.
Dunst stars as Justine, a newlywed who attempts to kick off her marriage to Skarsgård’s Michael the right way, but is plagued by depression at their wedding reception. Even with her sister, Claire, played by Gainsbourg, doing everything she can to keep Justine on her feet, her sorrows are all consuming. Meanwhile, a rogue planet called Melancholia looms in the background, threatening to destroy the world as we know it.
Dunst says it herself, Melancholia is a sci-fi movie, but it’s like none you’ve ever seen before. In fact, the film in its entirety is like nothing you’ve ever seen before and that certainly requires an exceptional mind to have behind it.
In honor of Melancholia’s run at the New York Film Festival as well as its upcoming November 11th release, Dunst, Skarsgård and Gainsbourg sat down for a particularly intimate roundtable interview to discuss their experience working on the film from their early days on set with von Trier up until seeing the finished film for the first time. Check it all out in the interview below.
How’d you get involved in the project? Did Lars von Trier contact you directly?
Kirsten Dunst: For me, I literally got an email, just like, ‘Read this script. Lars wants to talk to you tomorrow. He’s really interested in you for this movie,’ and we Skyped and it was so simple. I know that two directors had recommended me because it was supposed to be Penélope Cruz in the film at first, so two director friends of his mentioned me for the role. We barely even talked about the script, we just talked about The Night Porter and Charlotte Rampling and I don’t know. It was really simple for me.
Did you know how dark a role you would be playing?
Dunst: Yeah, I read the script. I knew I wasn’t doing a WB show here. [Laughs]
What was your reaction to the script? Did you have any reservations?
Dunst: I didn’t. I knew that whatever journey I was going on, it would be an interesting one and I’m always up for a challenge.
How was the tone of the film conveyed to you?
Dunst: Personally, I just know it’s a Lars film. I didn’t think stylistically how it would look so much until we were getting to these homes. Did anyone else?
Alexander Skarsgård: No.
Charlotte Gainsbourg: No, visually I didn’t even see it as being America. The castle, it was his atmosphere.
How does working with Lars differentiate from other directors you’ve worked with? What makes his style so unique?
Skarsgård: It’s very unconventional. It was such an interesting vibe and atmosphere. We all kind of lived together in the middle of nowhere in southern Sweden. You’re kind of used to working where you block a scene, then you have tape marks, then you shoot a master and the lights are coming from here and you got to find that light, and then you show up and he’s just like, ‘Alright, let’s see what happens.’ [Laughs] Like, ‘Oh, that was great,’ or ‘That sucked. Let’s try it again.’ He doesn’t care about continuity. He wants to be surprised. He wants to be like, ‘Oh, that was interesting. I didn’t expect that to happen.’ You do whatever you want, but then he’ll come in and you kind of feel like he’s editing it in his head as he watching it and he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s great, that’s interesting,’ and then if there’s something he needs then he’ll come in and he’ll just whisper something like, try this and try that. It’s really one of the most amazing experiences of my career.
Does he have you rehearse?
Skarsgård: No, well he shoots it. And it’s usually disaster. [Laughs] It is! Do you remember those big scenes with cars coming and going? And he’s like, ‘Alright, let’s shoot,’ and we’re like, ‘What’s my cue? When do I drive?’ But I get it because there are these moments that will happen. Most of it will be disaster because people will show up and be like, ‘Oh shit, what I am doing here?’ But then something will happen in that rehearsal, some little moment or something awkward or something that is real and you won’t be able to re-create that and he’ll be there with a camera and he’ll capture that. And then you’ll do it again obviously and you’ll fix what didn’t work but then he’ll have those little moments that he can put in.
Gainsbourg: It’s interesting to be off balance also. That’s what he works with, I find, is trying to push you a bit off your grounds and it’s very helpful.
Skarsgård: Well it makes it real because if you come and you’re like, ‘Alright, I’m an actor and this is what I’m going to do,’ planted in my head. ‘I’m going to do this and then I’m going to look over there when I say that line.’
Dunst: Oh, that’s not fun. [Laughs]
Skarsgård: It’s kind of great that he’s just like, ‘No, no, no. Break that up, do it differently, see what happens. Just be there.’
Gainsbourg: But I find that now it’s very difficult to work in a different way. You feel so free then suddenly when someone says, ‘Okay, we’re going to rehearse and you’re feeling, well, you’re missing stuff. It’s very difficult.
How do you handle that arc in the first part? At the beginning it’s rather happy and fun and then there’s that downward spiral.
Skarsgård: We talked about that before we started it and we were all kind of on the same page, kind of like, you gotta start somewhere to be able to go down here. You can’t start down there. You want a lightness and excitement. Is this gonna be a great day? You know, they’re both like, ‘Oh, okay. We’re at least trying.’ If you start in the limo and it’s just like, [moans], where do you go from there?
Did you guys shoot in order?
Dunst: No, not at all, but we did do that scene first. That was my first scene that I did.
Alexander, was your character supposed to be so dumb and unaware of the situation with Justine?
Skarsgård: [Laughs] No, I’m dumb as an actor. It’s all real [Laughs]. I think he’s just trying desperately. Justine is like a little fragile wounded bird or something and he believes he can make it better. He’s really like, ‘I’ll take care of you,’ and she kind of slowly drifts away and he’s struggling and trying to, ‘No, this is okay.’ There’s a scene that we shot that didn’t make it into the final cut –
Dunst: Lars was happiest about this scene. He was so happy with us that day. He was so happy and then it didn’t make the movie. [Laughs]
Skarsgård: I know and he told me and he was devastated. He’s like, [imitating von Trier] ‘It just didn’t work in the cut.’ But it’s a really sad moment, because Justine says she’s not happy and he’s like, ‘Well, no one’s happy. I’m not looking for happiness. It’s okay. You have moments of happiness, but no one’s really happy.’ And it was just so sad to hear Michael who you think is the kind of guy whose like, ‘No, no, no. It’s gonna be great,’ say like, ‘No, we’re content and we’ll have a pretty good life, but I’m not happy. Let’s just stay together because it’ll be all right.’ So sad in a way.
Alexander, your father’s worked with Lars several times, so did he have any advice for you before this shoot?
Skarsgård: No, he just said do it. If you ever get an opportunity to work with him, just do it.
And how was it working with your father?
Skarsgård: Everything about it was so amazing. We shot in Sweden, so on weekends, I went up to Stockholm to see my mom and my siblings. Just an amazing ensemble, one of the greatest directors out there and my old man is in it and I love working with him and just hanging out with him. It was the first and only time I’ve said yes to a project without having read the script. I just got a call and I was like, ‘Alright, I don’t know what he wants me to do, but I’ll do it.’
Charlotte, how was this a different experience from Antichrist?
Gainsbourg: It was very different. The first one felt so intimate and felt like a tiny crew and going to extremes. With this character everything was more subtle, it was more difficult for me to understand and to know where I was going because it was less extreme. And the crew felt different. The whole thing was really the opposite, which is nice. I was nervous before I started the second film because I enjoyed myself so much in the first one I was worried it wouldn’t be as good.
You enjoyed Antichrist?
Gainsbourg: Yeah, very very much – in a troubled way, but that’s why we do this job, not to go in easy places.
Was Lars a different director on both films?
Gainsbourg: Very different, I think he was not well when we shot Antichrist. He was always, not always, but he came up saying he didn’t know if he would be able to finish the film and with anxiety crisis he would leave the set. It was really hard for him so we suffered looking at him, not being able to cope with everything. For this he was good and he was saying how happy he felt and so it was nice to see him recover.
After the screening at Cannes, I came out thinking the movie would really shake the festival up because it’s so brilliant, but then that press conference happened. How did what happened there make you feel?
Dunst: I mean for me, I’ve just had to deal with like, ‘Your face and that press conference.’ It’s like turned into a YouTube clip, you know? [Laughs] It’s watching a friend unravel. I felt so awful for him and I knew that obviously it’s inappropriate what he said in that forum. I felt embarrassed for him, too.
Do you see this role pointing your career in a new direction? You’re not known for this type of role.
Dunst: Yeah and to me I never – I’ve always done a mixture, like I did The Virgin Suicides, but then I did Bring It On. To me, I’ve always mixed it up, so this is just an opportunity because of my age, too, and there aren’t that many roles like this that are so unconventional for women. To me it’s not a new direction personally, it just is the movie I chose to do next. You know what I mean? It wasn’t like a divisive decision. It came from a very honest and excited place.
I just meant coming off a Best Actress award in Cannes, that this would attract different kinds of roles offered to you.
Dunst: I don’t know. I did a really raunchy comedy just now, so I’m not someone who –
For whom?
A raunchy comedy. It was a play called Bachelorette and it’s Will Ferrell producing it. It’s really just like girls being awful. [Laughs] That was fun for me. I get to play a real bitch, which I never get to do, so it was fun.
Was it really emotionally taxing the entire experience? Was there a recovery time after?
Skarsgård: [Looks at Dunst] On Bachelorette.
Dunst: [Laughs] That’s what I was thinking! I went to Germany with my dad after. It’s good to do something immediately after, I think, and not sit there alone right after you finish because you do, you create a family and then it’s done and you have this schedule, too. So I went on a vacation with my dad and it was really nice. And it was weird because we went to this castle in Germany where Wagner wrote a lot of his music and where Ludwig lived, King Ludwig, which Lars named his son after, so it was a nice little – I didn’t realize my dad and I were going to this place. It’s called Neuschwanstein, it looks like a big Disney castle, [laughs] but it was fun because it was a little button on the end of something that I experienced and it was so special to me, so it was cathartic at the end. I was tired, but I wasn’t sad or, you know, there was nothing negative about it after for me.
Is there something you have to get in your head to bring this concept to life? Especially in the end when so much of Claire’s emotion is coming from seeing the planet in the background. Are you looking in the distance and picturing something?
Dunst: I didn’t
Gainsbourg: It’s your imagination.
Skarsgård: Ignorance is bliss. My guy has no fucking idea. [Laughs] No idea!
Would you want to work with Lars again and is there any truth to that thing he was mentioning in the press conference –
Dunst: The nymphomania – [to Charlotte] are you doing that?
Gainsbourg: [Nods]
Dunst: You are? [Laughs] That’s awesome!
Skarsgård: I think my dad is in it as well.
Gainsbourg: Yeah.
Dunst: Oh, that’s so awesome!
Gainsbourg: But I’m still crossing fingers that –
Which version?
Gainsbourg: I haven’t read the script. I just read a synopsis.
Is it kind of like the third in the apocalyptic trilogy?
Gainsbourg: I don’t know. [Laughs]
But he’s threatened to do two versions –
Dunst: a four-hour one.
How did you feel when you saw the movie after spending time shooting it? Maybe for you two because, [Alexander], you weren’t really in the other half.
Skarsgård: But that’s why I could actually watch the second half of the movie as a member of the audience and kind of just enjoy it. It’s always weird when you watch yourself, especially the first time, I’m very critical and I kind of dissect my own performance. I’m like, ‘Oh fuck. That was – why? Oh! That’s way too big,’ and, ‘Why did I do that? Oh, really? They chose that take? I remember another one that was much better.’ I wasn’t able to go to Cannes, I was working in LA on something so I missed Cannes, so I went back to Sweden in May and it was in theaters then, or in June right after Cannes and I just, oh, I thought it was amazing. Just the sound, I saw it in the theater and the second half –
Dunst: The sound is crazy at the end.
Skarsgård: It just blew me away.
Dunst: I laughed at Cannes. I turned to my friend, I was like, ‘What is going on?’ [Laughs] Not because I thought it was funny, but it was so intense. I thought it was amazing though. I thought the end was really cool when I saw it all done for the first time. I haven’t seen an ending in a theater like that. And it’s so unexpected because it’s so intimate and then this huge, you know. It is a sci-fi movie. It is. I don’t want to say that it is, but it’s kind of awesome to call it a sci-fi movie because the more intimate, the more weird and, I don’t know, I’d be happy if this went into a sci-fi genre.
The beginning foreshadows everything, but I feel like by the end you kind of forget about all that and you’re still surprised because you get so wrapped up in the characters, which I thought was really cool.
Dunst: And the planet stuff was never – I was so worried that that would look weird or be distracting or look really phony. Did you guys ever think that?
Gainsbourg: No.
Dunst: You always thought it was gonna look good? I was like, ‘What is this blue light?’ [Laughs]
Gainsbourg: I was more worried about the horse riding.
Dunst: Oh, yeah. That.
Did you ride?
Dunst: A little. [Laughs] We took it for a walk.
Skarsgård: A walk?
Dunst: [Laughs] Well, we weren’t galloping through the woods.
Gainsbourg: [Unintelligible] Wood horses.
Dunst: [Laughs] So embarrassing.
Gainsbourg: And he didn’t use any of it.
Skarsgård: You were sitting on wooden horses, pretending?
Dunst: Yeah.
Skarsgård: I wonder why that never made the movie. [Laughs]
How was it shooting the two parts? Were they separate in the shooting schedule?
Dunst: Nope, all mixed up, for the most part. We did the reception a little bit together and then we moved locations for two weeks to Gothenburg and shot an hour outside of there at the big mansion.
Is there anything specific that he told you that needed to be different, maybe in terms of the point at which your character is at? You’re a different person in this half.
Dunst: Right. That was natural to me because I’m an actor. You know, I should know where I’m at in the movie. So for me there wasn’t any like, ‘And now, it’s this.’ I know what scene we’re at and where we are in the script.
Did Lars give you any advice before going in, any specific direction that sticks with you?
Gainsbourg: I remember he asked me to watch Persona.
Dunst: Yeah. And he told me to watch A Philadelphia Story, too.
Gainsbourg: Really?
Dunst: Yeah.
Skarsgård: He told me to watch A Philadelphia Story, too.
Dunst: I’d seen it before, but, yeah.
Why?
Dunst: I think because it takes place at a wedding and it’s funny and charming and he didn’t want to lose that essence even though it was a film about depression.
How about your personal preparation processes? What do you all like to do? Break down the script, anything like that?
Skarsgård: I just sit and I read the script like three times a day and then I take notes, just write down ideas and then 98% of them will be crap and then it’s just finding those things that you thought of when you read it and finding those interesting things. It’s just inspiration and coming up with ideas and then that’s how I like finding the character, is how I work.
You’ve been working with so many great directors. Is there any aspiration to direct yourself?
Skarsgård: I’ve done a little bit of that in Sweden. I directed a short and a couple of commercials. And, yeah, I’ve written some stuff. I’d like to do that eventually.
Dunst: I’ve done two shorts before. I like it a lot. But I like it small – it would take me a minute to feel confident enough in a story. I don’t have any ideas that I feel confident enough in right now to direct a film.
Gainsbourg: Yeah, I feel intimidated by that process, but I wish I could.
Do you think that the film has a happy ending?
Skarsgård: I do in a weird way.
Dunst: Yeah.
Skarsgård: I don’t want to give it away, but there’s that one little moment between the sisters at the end and I was like, ‘Aw.’
Dunst: They all saw the movie. It’s okay. Oh, you mean – [Laughs]. Yeah, okay. Oh, that’s sweet.
Skarsgård: No I did! Because you finally connected, you know?
Dunst: Yeah.
Skarsgård: And then we all died, [laughs] but there was that little brief moment.
Dunst: My girlfriend saw it last night and she had the biggest smile on her face at the end and then other friends of mine looked zombified. I like that the film has so many different reactions that you really can’t conform it or really explain what the movie – it’s hard to – this is the hardest movie I’ve ever had to talk about because it’s not one that you can sum up or compartmentalize into things. It’s really for the audience to experience themselves, which is rare.
Were you aware of those extraordinary opening images?
Dunst: I kind of knew what it would look like, a little bit, but I didn’t know beautifully it would all go together like that.
I’ve got a cheesy last question; how would you react to the end of the world?
Dunst: I don’t know. I’d be sad if I never had kids and it was the end of the world, but, I don’t know. [Laughs] If it was the end of the world, like, tomorrow I’d probably just drink with my friends or something. I don’t know. [Laughs]
Skarsgård: I’d go hang out with my family.
Gainsbourg: I’d just want it to be quick and not know about it.
Dunst: Yeah, we don’t have to worry about this, so it’s not happen guys; it’s okay. [Laughs] Not today.