http://www.premiere.com/Premiere/Article/New/0%2C2050%2C174_4466_1%2C00.html

Premiere  2000-10

By Glenn Kenny

Photography by Dana Menussi


"Björk's Big Adventure"


Björk Gudmundsdottir is a very professional interviewee. Led to a corner 
booth at a stylish Indian restaurant in Manhattan, she is polite but not 
at all pally as introductions are made. She sits upright, her back 
straight, almost stiff, adopting a businesslike demeanor that's somewhat 
at odds with the Barbie-pink midiskirt-and-jacket ensemble she's 
wearing. She's small, but not nearly as tiny as one might imagine. In 
person she definitely doesn't look, oh, 12, as she sometimes does in her 
music videos, but she sure doesn't look 34 either. And there's nothing 
elfin or ethereal or madcap or kooky (or - what's that word they all use
to describe artists like Björk? - oh, yeah, quirky) about her.

She's great at answering questions. She'll take one and just run with 
it, take it to the end of its thread, so that by the time she's through 
talking you can pretty much just toss your three follow-up questions. On 
the subject of making a film versus making an album, for example, the 
pioneering rock musician has this to say: "It seems to me that people 
who make films are very logical and they talk a lot. I'm not dissing 
them in any way, but it's just different; they're very outgoing and it's 
very above-waist, and music is very below-waist, if you see what I'm 
saying. If you want to write a song with someone, you would never say, 
'See you at 4 on Monday, and the song'll be done at 4:30.' It's like the 
only way a song could not happen. You may spend a week with the person 
and get drunk and end up hitchhiking through France and then on the 
train back you write a whole album in a half an hour. That's more how 
music is made."

She is here mainly to talk about Dancer in the Dark, which she refers to 
as "the first and last movie I ever acted in" - a deliberately 
inaccurate statement, because she did in fact act in a Bergmanesque, 
Icelandic-made drama called The Juniper Tree, back in 1987, and had a 
cameo in Robert Altman's Ready to Wear (Pręt-ā-Porter). But, she says,
"I was not present [for Juniper Tree]; I had just had a baby, I was 
inside this bubble, it was the most gorgeous period of my life. With 
Dancer in the Dark, I gave all and more." Indeed, she adds, "My friends
came over to visit me [on the set] and didn't recognize me. They worried
about my mental health, because they'd never seen me like that."

This astonishing film-a sometimes vérité-looking hybrid of musical and 
melodrama that either brilliantly or perversely denies its audience the 
usual pleasures of those genres and instead strives for high tragedy - 
was the talk of this year's Cannes film festival, winning the Palme d'or
for its director, Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves), and a Best 
Actress award for Björk. It is no exaggeration to say that the film 
could not exist without Björk's performance, as Selma, a poor immigrant
factory worker toiling away in a bleakly imagined America, saving money
for an operation that will spare her son from the same mysterious 
ailment that's robbing her of her own eyesight. Despite an international
cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare, David Morse, and 
Joel Grey, the Cannes buzz was all about her portrayal, which reduced 
many in the audience to tears. Odd, then, that here's a woman with very
little traditional acting experience who gets asked to carry an 
extremely ambitious motion picture, hits one out of the park, and then 
announces that she'll - never act again. Something must be up.

Perhaps it was collaborating with Von Trier. The Danish director is 
known for his unusual working methods. (For his previous film, The 
Idiots, he had his actors participate in an unsimulated orgy; on the 
Dancer set, he sometimes practically pushed his handheld video camera 
into the actors' faces.) It was widely reported that Björk stormed off 
the Dancer set at least once. A video monitor smashed in the heat of 
anger has been mentioned.

Björk doesn't deny there was tension. But she insists it's not the 
reason she's renouncing acting. "What was going on on the set was 
nothing compared to the work that went into the music," she says, "and 
nobody said one word about that." When she heard about the Cannes award, 
she says, "I immediately thought it was for the music. And when they 
told me it was for the acting, my feeling was, 'I don't want to sound 
ungrateful, but it's not where my heart is.' My heart definitely belongs 
to sound."

Sound is where her heart has belonged for at least a quarter of a 
century. The Icelandic-born singer made her first record at the age of 
11, and her musical career was into its second decade when the band she 
fronted, the anarchic new wave combo the Sugarcubes, made an 
international splash in 1988. Her solo-career, which began in 1993 with 
the somewhat ironically titled Debut, has seen her continue to 
collaborate with some of the most forward-thinking, and sometimes 
seemingly unlikely, creators in the European music community.

Then again, anyone who has followed Björk's life and career knows to 
expect the unexpected. She has often presented a persona that can seem 
more than a little loopy. On her first solo hit she sang, "There's 
definitely definitely definitely no logic to human behavior," and her 
personal life would seem to follow that dictum. She was once 
romantically linked to a weird-looking dude with gold teeth (drum 'n' 
bass pioneer Goldie). And didn't she pound the crap out of some reporter 
in Bangkok once? Similarly, Von Trier, whose memorably off-kilter works 
also include Zentropa and the definitively deranged Danish TV_miniseries 
The Kingdom, and who cofounded the ascetic film movement-practical joke 
known as Dogma 95, enjoys playing the eccentric (among other things, he 
really has no "Von" in his name, but reportedly appended one there as a 
kind of homage to not-quite-normal auteurs von Stroheim and von 
Sternberg). And then there's the fact that Björk's role in the movie, as 
the ultimate self-sacrificing mom, would be a bear for even the most 
seasoned actress to handle. It could be argued that no movie has 
demanded so much of its lead actress since Breaking the Waves, but 
really, there's no reason to stop there. No movie has demanded so much 
of its lead actress since Carl Dreyer's 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc, 
a picture Von Trier clearly reveres, a picture that so utterly defined 
its lead actress, Maria Falconetti, that she, in fact, never made 
another film. Hmmm.

That's such a tidy analogy that one can't help but imagine there's a 
deeper story behind this no-more-acting vow. But Björk insists there 
isn't. She characterizes the atmosphere on the set of Dancer as 
"brilliant." When told this, Von Trier himself asks, "Yeah, okay, but 
what does that mean?" Bjork calls Von Trier's often - vérité style 
"genius." Still, she'd be the first to admit that "going through what 
Selma was going through was very painful. It was painful just to wake up 
in the morning." And she likens acting in Dancer to "signing on to war, 
going to the Vietnam War. I believed I might die. Acting is like jumping 
from a cliff without a parachute."

For his part, Von Trier says, "I felt like a policeman who had to force 
Björk to do something she really didn't want to do all the time. It was 
not pleasant at all, and I don't think she could have said it was 
pleasant."

"She cannot really act - she can just be." That's what Catherine Deneuve 
said about her costar Björk at Cannes. Good quote - very dramatic and 
mythmaking and all that, but it's a bit of a crock nonetheless. 
Certainly, some of her costars are pretty convinced that she has the 
stuff to be a movie star, if she so desired. "You can't do what she did 
on that picture without being a good actress," says Joel Grey (Cabaret), 
who plays a tap-dancing trial witness in Dancer. David Morse, who 
portrays Selma's villainous neighbor and whose exchanges with Selma make 
up some of the film's most shocking scenes, says that Björk became the 
character "in the way she had to experience things. For instance, I 
don't think she's ever picked up a gun in her life. So to bring herself 
to do these things that were deeply, genuinely repulsive to her - she 
couldn't pretend to do them. But I think she truly has the instincts of 
an actress."

"I agree that I'm very instinct-driven," Björk says. "That's just the 
way I am. And when Lars convinced me to act the [part], he asked me not 
to act. Acting was bad; that's what professionals do. I had to become 
the girl. That was fine with me, because I'm not - interested in being 
technical."

So, when people speak of what she can or cannot do, she doesn't take it 
as an insult, but as a compliment. It's like she's a magician who's 
really sold her trick. The craft-versus-instinct thing is something 
she's always aware of; she speaks of her grandfather, who is a 
carpenter, and how sometimes they'll get together and he'll show her a 
picture of a fireplace he's built, and she'll play him her latest 
record, and they'll both appreciate their accomplishments on the same 
level. Dancer's bizarre, impressionistically lit musical numbers, which 
Selma conjures up to escape from - or comment on - her dreary existence, 
have more than a little in common with the video Björk made with Being 
John Malkovich director Spike Jonze for the song "It's Oh So Quiet,"_in 
which she cavorts around a tire store. Von Trier (who cites Jonze's 
video as his inspiration for casting Björk in Dancer) breaks out of his 
quasi-documentary mode for these musical scenes; they were shot with 100 
fixed video cameras, many of them hidden from the actors' view. The 
songs Björk wrote almost always take their cues from some repetitive, 
mechanical noise - the clank of tray - making machines, the turning of
train wheels - and then transmogrify into gorgeous, otherworldly, 
sometimes orchestral soundscapes.

It's the music-making aspect of the Dancer experience that Björk is most 
protective of, most eager to hang on to. The much-cited instance where 
she stormed off the set was, she insists, over a disagreement about how 
the music was being edited to fit the picture. "The conflict wasn't 
between me and Lars either; that's another misunderstanding. It's been 
exaggerated a lot. I had been working 16 hours a day, every day." She is 
a little vague about who "they" are, but "they" apparently "were 
changing the songs. I had done one and a half years of work with an 80- 
piece orchestra, and then I'm working on the set as an actress; I'd come 
home in the evening and they'd say, 'Oh, they cut a minute out of the 
middle of something,' and I would say, 'No, you can't do that; I'm ready 
to cooperate but you just can't do that....' "No one who hasn't actually
made a record has any idea just how much work goes into it - work that,
as fulfilling as it can ultimately be, is often backbreaking and 
tedious. But that's the work she lives for. "So I walked away and came 
back with a manifesto, and they were all musical things, such as, I had
to have the - final say on the music because we had never signed a 
contract - me and Lars, everything was based on trust - so I said, I 
have to do the - final mix, the actors can't do the vocals without 
me...." It seems to be all she thinks about, this music, or music in 
general. Even here in New York, months after Cannes, as she works on her
next album, she says she's been toying with the audio mix for Dancer. 
For the CD of her Dancer music, which she has titled Selmasongs, she 
enlisted fellow musical risk-takers such as - Radiohead's Thom Yorke to 
sing in place of the actors, because, Björk says, "I see the album not 
as the soundtrack to the film but rather as the realization of Selma's 
dream. I want this record to be my gift to Selma."

She doesn't get quite so pretentious as to liken her musical works to 
her children, but when she talks about her 14-year-old son, Sindri, and 
how much of Selma's maternal instinct stems from her own life, you hear 
some parallels. "The second time in my life that I was ever physically 
violent was four years ago, when this woman in Thailand was trying to 
interview my son live on the air and she was crazily abusing it, and I 
ust saw red and hit her. It's a different energy there when you want to 
protect your children. I remember after that, me and my son going to see 
Aliens, and there's that line in there, 'Get away from her, you bitch!' 
And we were laughing our heads off, because this had just happened to 
us!"

Dancer in the Dark is in fact a dark film, and while Björk doesn't seem 
to have any regrets about it, she's very happy to be moving on. "After -
being - Selma for so long, it was great to go back to being Björk. There 
may still be a little Selma left in me." Honestly, though, there doesn't 
seem to be much. What's left, it seems, is a woman who knows what she 
wants and will not let anybody tell her otherwise. Agents, directors, 
screenwriters, take note: "If I'm lucky I've got 50 years left, and I 
should spend all of them on songs." That, it seems, would pretty much be 
that. The experience was apparently of the most value in terms of 
helping her establish where, and what, she should be. "I've never felt 
so lucky and so grateful as I am now," she says. Her dance into the 
world of film led her to what she already knew. Her air of contentment 
expands when the interview concludes and the tape recorder is turned 
off, and Björk - almost automatically relaxes, curls up her legs, and 
starts sampling, with great (and practically elfin) eagerness, a tray of 
appetizers that up until this point she has been very professionally 
ignoring.