I Like America and America Likes Me
Cinema Scope: One of the biggest stories in Cannes this year is your physical return and the controversy that is associated with it, but, call me crazy, I want to talk about the film that you made, which is about a serial killer. Last time out, in Nymphomaniac (2013), you made a film about sex; The House That Jack Built is about violence, and, perhaps not coincidentally, is a sexless film. Why did you want to make a serial-killer film?
Lars Von Trier: I saw the serial-killer thing more like a genre than anything else. I’ve always taken a genre and tried to make something collide with it. So for me it’s not a real serial-killer film, in a sense. I was not so afraid of the violence because I’ve seen worse, much worse in films. But maybe the audience who will see the films that I make don’t go and see the more violent films, I don’t know…But they said that a hundred people walked out of the premiere last night…
Scope: Lars, that’s not many!
Von Trier: They asked me, “How do you feel about a hundred leaving?” and I said, “It should have been two hundred.”
Even though for some reason the festival decided to print an “explicit violence” warning on the ticket—which I’ve never seen here before—the film is not really all that violent. Well, of course there are some scenes that will offend people, such as the treatment of
