http://ifmagazine.com/common/article.asp?articleID=843 if Magazine 2000-10-06 By Mike Tunison "Dancer Fever!" Idiosyncratic pop star Björk sets the record straight on her troubled but fruitful collaboration with danish director Lars von Trier on Dancer in the Dark. Even if she hadn't been giving interviews on the same topic for weeks, Björk wouldn't exactly need psychic powers to guess what she'll be asked first in a roundtable sit-down with L.A. movie journalists. And sure enough, a reporter cuts to the chase the moment she's settled in her chair: Is the Icelandic pop diva serious about never acting again after winning a best-actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival for her very first movie? Choosing her words with care, the famously independent-minded singer- songwriter politely clarifies something she feels has been blown out of proportion by the international "gutter press." With a sparkling koala bear-shaped purse adding a single note of Björk-ish eccentricity to her otherwise conservative green dress ensemble, she explains that the fact that she doesn't intend to continue her screen career beyond her much- gushed-over debut in DANCER IN THE DARK has nothing to do with the film or her much-publicized differences with its maverick Danish director, Lars von Trier (BREAKING THE WAVES). It's just that she plans on devoting herself once again to her first love: her music. Her performance in DANCER grew out of her collaboration with von Trier on the film's score, and she never intended to take the acting thing beyond that single project. "The reason why I didn't want to act [again] was not because of the film -- I've always felt like that," she says. "It was more because being in that creative environment where the film was, I sort of made an exception -- once. So it's sort of because of that film that I wanted to act; it's not because of the film that I don't want to. I just think that I should do music. I think that's where I'm at my best." And, no, she's not absolutely, positively, 100-percent certain she won't get the acting bug again at some point down the road. "It's not like I've got it all planned out," she says. "Because things keep happening - thank God - that I could never even have imagined, right? But right now I feel very strong about focusing on music. I think there's quite a lot of people out there who can act in films, but I get really depressed when I go to Tower Records. I don't think there's a lot of good CDs there, eh?" Her original attraction to DANCER was the idea of working with von Trier on a series of songs to express musically the inner journey of the film's heroine, a Czech immigrant named Selma who is struggling to save her young son from the same inherited condition that is slowly making her go blind. The protagonist finds relief from her grueling work in a factory with daydreams inspired by the American musicals she adores - an excuse for von Trier to turn the film into a semi-musical in its own right, albeit one shot in an offbeat, handheld video-shot style light years from a Judy Garland picture. For the 34-year-old Björk, who has already put out a remarkable 14 albums between her solo projects and work with bands such as the Sugarcubes (it helps that she started releasing them at age 11), DANCER's score was a chance to step outside her own head and write from another person's perspective - to "give up my interior to somebody else," she explains. "I'd done three solo albums in a row, and that's quite narcissistic, right? So I was kind of ready to get really craftsmanshipy. I did 10 years of academic classical education as a child, so I was ready to go kind of go really anal and kind of into music. And the whole idea of writing the music and hooking up with Lars and going back and getting somebody else's vision, I was really into that. That's a challenge. I think people that complete other people's visions are actually understated. I think sometimes that's actually a harder job than just sitting there and thinking of something." Von Trier was so taken with Björk's work and famously offbeat presence that he made the characteristically bold decision to ask her to play Selma, despite the fact that she had never acted in a film before. Aware of the enormous difference between appearing in music videos and taking the lead in a film as intense and challenging as DANCER, the singer nonetheless found herself agreeing to the idea -- and risking the most excruciating kind of public humiliation if she didn't pull it off. In the end, she followed her initial feeling and took on the challenge, believing "my instinct is like 50 times more wise than my head, for sure," she says. "My instinct was like, 'Yeah, go, go, go!' And my head was going like, 'This is the most ridiculous thing you could ever do in your life. You might as well start. I don't know what. It's so stupid.' And all my creative family, that I've worked with since I was a teenager, they're all going, 'Don't do it. It's ridiculous.' But I had to do this." Writing the music was another gut-level process, borne out of her intense connection to Selma's painful struggle to save her son even if it means sacrificing herself. "I read the script and my immediate reaction was very emotional," Björk says. "I would start writing the songs from a very emotional point-of- view, as more of a form of love for Selma rather than anything else. For me to react in an intellectual way about things like that - I couldn't even if I tried. It's not what I'm about." She was pleased to find that she had what amounted to total creative freedom when it came to writing the score. "That's the part that Lars wasn't interested in at all -- he's a filmmaker, right?" she says. "And that's why he contacted me, because he wanted someone who had opinions on what they were doing and were their own person. I mean, you can imagine how many other people he could have hired, right? And me being one of the most idiosyncratic people around. So I kind of did the musical bit very much how I wanted to." To her chagrin, however, the latitude given to her while composing didn't necessarily continue after the filmmakers began editing her work down for inclusion in the film. Ultimately, it was her fierce protection of her music, not her work as an actor, that led to a widely reported dispute with von Trier, she says. At one point, she became so incensed over what she felt was a loss of creative control over the score that she walked off the set, returning the following day with a list of demands. "Actually that's been quite exaggerated in the gutter press - I only once left," she says. "And it wasn't like I wasn't going to come back, but it was about my music. I made like a list of things, like a manifesto. And it was, I want to mix my tunes with people that I know. These songs are not going to be mixed in Denmark. I'm going to take them to London and mix them with the people I usually work with. I'm going to do the album sleeve of my album. The record's going to be the way I want it to be. I'm going to have a final mix, and after Cannes, for example, I went back and mixed it again. So basically what I was asking for was that I could protect my music. Nothing to do with the film. Nothing to do with [it] being too hard to be Selma or the acting was difficult or anything." Seeing the film afterward, she finds it impossible to be objective about her work on-screen. "I can't really relate to it, to be honest," she says. "I don't even have an opinion on it. I can't look at it from the outside. I just remember what happened. I know I gave everything I've got and a lot more, so I feel proud about the thing. If I close my eyes, I know all my heart is in there, and that's all I can do." How has she reacted to the accolades from Cannes and critics around the world? When asked, she looks back at the questioner in incomprehension at an unfamiliar English term. "What does 'accolades' mean?" she replies. "Praise," an interviewer prompts. "I guess I'm really flattered, but it's not that simple," she says. "I guess because I've been in the public eye for so long, you kind of train a side of you that doesn't take these things in. I don't want to sound ungrateful, but if this would start affecting you, you'd be in trouble."