NEW YORK — When actor Willem Dafoe arrived on the Swedish set of Lars von Trier's "Manderlay" a number of years back, the filmmaker asked if they might meet to discuss Dafoe's role.
It was far from a typical meeting.
Von Trier first asked if Dafoe was a morning person. Then he asked him if he liked to swim. When Dafoe answered yes to both, the director said good; he had a plan.
So at 7 a.m. the next morning on an icy late-winter day, Von Trier picked up Dafoe at his hotel and drove them to a frigid lake.
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"We arrived, and it was really cold, but we both stripped down and jumped in," Dafoe recalled. "We stayed in for about two seconds. Then we got out, and he drove me back to where I was staying. As we pulled up he said, 'OK, see you on set.' We never talked about the role. He just wanted someone to bond and have an adventure with."
The incident illustrates the conscious strangeness of Von Trier — when it comes to actor get-togethers, most filmmakers prefer script dissections at breakfast to wordless reenactments of the polar bear club— but also unexpectedly endearing elements, like a desire for human connection.
The director, whose sex-addiction drama "Nymphomaniac: Vol. 2" arrived in theaters Friday on the heels of the first installment last month, took a vow of media silence in the aftermath of a Cannes Film Festival press conference in 2011 at which he sparked a global outcry by joking that he sympathized with Nazis.
But conversations with what might be called the Von Trier rep company — collectively it's a group that has made more than 12 movies with the director — complicate the popular portrait of a heartless black comedian who enjoys acts of antagonism for their own sake. Von Trier, they suggest, can be provocative, distant and needling but also introspective, sensitive and thoughtful.
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At a time when many foreign directors are known only to a niche group and Hollywood helmers are increasingly corporate hired hands, Von Trier, 57, defies both types. The director of arty melodramas such as "Breaking the Waves," "Dancer in the Dark" and "Melancholia" — and pioneer of the controversial naturalist-cinema movement Dogme 95 — remains one of moviedom's most colorful figures and its most enigmatic.
Eating away inside
It's easy enough to see how the negative view of Von Trier developed; he's done plenty to create it himself.
The Dane has a long history of making provocative comments that make people uncomfortable and offer evidence of a lack of taste and maturity. Most infamously, at a press conference to promote "Melancholia" at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, the conversation veered far from the film, and Von Trier wound up saying controversial things including, "I understand Hitler, but I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely ... but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit."
The room — and the film world — was stunned. Twitter quickly bounced the comments around the world. An apology came the next day, but shortly after Cannes declared Von Trier persona non grata.
Long after the press has moved on from the latest Von Trier provocation, the director's own battles and guilt continue, say those who know him well.
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Cannes-gate, they say, was a perfect example. The fracas even fueled "Nymphomaniac." The film — the combined director's cut is about 51/2 hours long, but the theatrical versions are only about two hours apiece — tells in flashback the coming-of-age tale of a sex addict named Joe (Stacy Martin and Charlotte Gainsbourg play the character as younger and older woman, respectively) who is telling her story to the academic Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard).
In the first film we see mainly a younger Joe engaging in various forms of sexual nihilism. In the second film, Joe has become sexually desensitized and tries to regain feeling with such activities as sadomasochism sessions with a domineering Jamie Bell.
When Skarsgard read the script he found himself making quick mental notes. "That's Cannes," he said, miming the flipping of a page, "and that's Cannes," as he referred to an argument Seligman and Joe have over the need for political correctness that could read like a volley from and retort to his critics. It's these digressions that make watching a Von Trier movie fun — like a cinematic game of "Where's Lars?" — and also has fortified naysayers who argue the director can't make a movie about anything but his own state of mind.
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