http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/092300/dancerinthedark.sml Foxnews 2000-09-23 By Keith Collins "Bjork's Acting Debut: Dancer in the Dark" NEW YORK - "It was all about creating something that hasn't existed before." With that, quirky Icelandic singer Bjork succinctly sums up why she "stepped off the ledge" and teamed up with aggressively idiosyncratic Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier on his latest opus, Dancer in the Dark. The film opens this weekend in New York, and in additional cities Oct. 6. Bjork's fearless performance in the Dancer, which won the ex-Sugarcubes frontwoman the best actress award at this year's Cannes Film Festival (where the film also took top honors), has thrust the elfin Icelander into the international spotlight as never before. Bjork plays Selma, a Czech immigrant in 1960s Washington state working at a tool factory to pay for an operation to save her young son's sight. Alongside the melodrama, von Trier fills the film with flight-of-fancy musical numbers that portray Selma's desire to escape from her own impending blindness... and later, from a devastating twist of fate. From Composer to Actress At first, Bjork was only planning to compose Dancer in the Dark's score. She says a longtime desire to mount her own musical - using common "found items" instead of traditional instruments - led her to accept the gig. And the score definitely includes unusual sounds: Several of Dancer's musical numbers are set to unconventional music such as industrial- machine beats or clacking train tracks. But what spurred the leap from composer to the film's star? As von Trier searched for an actress to play the emotionally wrenched Selma, Bjork discovered she had become very protective of the character through the scoring process and wasn't inclined to just "hand over my music to some Danish people and wave it good-bye." When Bjork finally accepted von Trier's persistent invitation to play Selma, it wasn't a snap decision. "I'm very stubborn and I could have quite easily said 'no' for ages, but at that point I'd gotten to know this woman so well, it wouldn't be like acting for me," Bjork says. "It had gone way beyond 'Bjork the actress.' It was an extension of my music. "I did it from my love for Selma and her emotional point of view," the singer says. An Emotionally Frought Performance Catherine Deneuve, who plays a coworker and friend to Selma, says Bjork immersed herself in the character to a degree that was at times startling. At Cannes, the French actress was widely reported to have described Bjork's work as not acting, but simply being herself. Deneuve says that, in fact, that quality fit the role extremely well. "She had the kind of innocence you sometimes have when you've never done something," says the French screen legend ("I'm not a legend. Legends are dead," she protests). Bjork "was sometimes destroyed, nervously and emotionally" by her performance, Deneuve says. "She is a delicate, fragile and strong person." Even with such inner fortitude, there were some scenes Bjork couldn't handle. In one shot, Bjork had to slap the face of the actor playing her son. But in the end, another actress' hand was used. "She couldn't do it. It was too much for her," Deneuve says. Bjork also endured some strife behind the scenes, abandoning the production for five days when she discovered that von Trier's editors were slicing bits from her song score to fit the film. "I'd been film 12-hour days for months, and then I'd come home in the evening to find they'd taken five bars out of something that took me, like, a month to do. And these people haven't done music ever, they've just recored footsteps all their life," Bjork says. She then wrote a manifesto that demanded final mix on all the music in the film. If von Trier refused, she said she'd walk. He acquiesced. Mixed Reviews The result of the Bjork/von Trier collaboration, shot with more than 100 digital video cameras, has been embraced by some critics, shredded by others. Self-professed von Trier fan Joel Grey, who has a small role in the film as "the Fred Astaire of Czechoslovakia," as he describes it, says his first thought upon reading the script was that "it was bizarre, very hard to envision and in certain respects extremely simple-minded. "But that simple-mindedness turned into its most unique quality, its innocence. I think it's really like Lars' and Bjork's dream." Bjork's dream doesn't include returning to a film set anytime soon, despite the rave reviews she's garnered. As she notoriously proclaimed when accept her Cannes award, she is through with acting. But Bjork's experience on Dancer, despite the media conjecture, is not what has her shunning future movie roles. "I want to make very sure that [people] know it's not because of this film. I don't mind difficult stuff, I'm actually attracted to tough stuff," she says. "But I can be more generous in the music studio," where she's now mixing her next album, Bjork says. "You should be where you function the best."