http://www.timeoutny.com/features/261/261.ft.bjork.html TimeOut 2000-10 By Stephen Garrett Photograph by Chris Buck "A Star Is Björn" What do you get when you cross a strong-willed Icelandic pop star with a control-freak Danish director? Dancer in the Dark, Lars von Trier's controversial Cannes hit that has made Björk vow never to act again. "I've decided I don't care about films," Björk says boldly. Her tongue darts across her upper lip. "I'm sorry, I wish I did, but you're talking about Muslims trying to support Catholicism here. My heart is with music, you know?" These words are hard to swallow, spilling from the woman whose gut- wrenching performance in Lars von Trier's new musical melodrama, Dancer in the Dark, won rapturous applause and reduced some viewers to blubbering tears at the Cannes Film Festival in May. They are surprising words indeed, considering that the film, which opens the New York Film Festival on Friday 22, won the Palme d'or, and earned Björk the festival's Best Female Performance award - this after she'd declared that she would never act again. It's our loss: As Selma, a Sound of Music-obsessed Czech factory worker who is slowly losing her vision while hoping to save her son from hereditary blindness, Björk delivers one of the year's most riveting performances - sweet, funny, shocking, sad, devastating. "Nobody talks about the movie's music, do they?" she asks, her brow furrowing playfully. "Remember Cannes?" It's true that journalists at the festival's press conference not only brushed aside her standout performance, but also virtually ignored the brilliant soundtrack Björk had produced for the film (Selmasongs is in record stores now). They seemed only interested in verifying the salacious rumors about on-set tensions between Björk and Von Trier: She was difficult and temperamental; she stormed off the set for several days; by the end of the shoot, she even went "mad." Björk skipped the conference, refusing to explain. "She would feel as if this were a crucifixion," Von Trier told those in attendance. "Maybe she will talk about it in ten years." As it turns out, the hubbub ("Two virtuosos on a collision course," mocked the British film magazine Sight and Sound) was exaggerated. "We did disagree on things," she says diplomatically, from her suite at the SoHo Grand. "But we would make up all the time. The media has blown that a little bit out of proportion. But this was painful for me. Lars is very attracted to pain; he says that openly. For him, pain equals truth - and being happy is lying. I don't agree with that. But maybe that's also why I was attracted to working with him in the first place." Months later, Von Trier expresses a belated fondness for Björk, but he is still caustic: "She's a sweet person; she just had a problem with me," he says in a phone interview from his native country. "Maybe it's because Denmark was a kingdom and Iceland its colony," he jokes. "Maybe it was humiliating for her to talk Danish in school - but I'm not to blame for that!" Von Trier decided he wanted Björk, 34, to play the lead in his film after seeing the video for her song "It's Oh So Quiet." A postmodern homage to the kaleidoscopic footwork of Busby Berkeley and to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the Spike Jonze - directed mini- masterpiece features dance numbers that spontaneously erupt in and around an unglamorous gas station. With gear-stripping mood reversals that take Björk back and forth between mundane reality and a kinetic fantasy world, the video had just the tone Von Trier wanted for his own musical - a project Björk thought was inspired. "Lars's script seemed like a childhood dream of mine come true," she says. "I could do a spartan musical where there would be nothing added - it would be you in the kitchen, and you'd feel a song coming on, and you'd use a fork as an instrument and stand up and sing. I told Lars straight away that I wouldn't act, but I would write the music for Selma and give her a voice." To Von Trier, she was a dream star. "The script, which I had written before I met Björk, had so many similarities to her own life," he explained during a Cannes interview. "She had worked in a fish factory in Iceland, listening to music and making rhythms - by coincidence. Growing up, she had seen The Sound of Music 20 times - by coincidence - because that was the only film they had in her little town. And she has a son who was the same age [her son, Sindri, was 12 at the time]." The director couldn't imagine anyone else for the role. "I am very stubborn when I get an idea," he said. Björk told him she wouldn't even consider playing Selma without some changes - and her demands are what eventually imbued the character with a wise, quiet dignity. "Lars had ideas about Selma, that she was stupid and naive," Björk explains. "I wanted to protect her. I feel strongly about introverts; I think there are a lot of us out there, and it's about time someone fights for us." Before shooting started in the summer of 1999, the pair put in more than a year just hammering out the music. Björk spent weeks at home in Iceland writing songs - she even holed up for a spell in a small ski hut in the mountains, going on two- and three-hour walks every day in the snow for inspiration. Periodically, she would travel to Von Trier's summer cabin north of Copenhagen to play her music for the director. In the beginning, Von Trier wanted Björk to improvise the song's lyrics on the spot. But the musician says that as she got to know Selma, she felt it would work better if Von Trier could articulate his thoughts on the character; he wrote the words with the help of Sjön, a poet and friend of Björk's since she was 16. For melodic inspiration, Björk and Von Trier rented all the movie musicals they could find - though they later decided that the films confused their vision of a pure, Dogma 95 - style punk spectacle. "We both wanted to do something that had never been done before," she says. "It was better to go by this blurred fantasy in your head." It wasn't until the film's shoot in Denmark that heavy friction began between the two. They had naturally opposing personalities, and with Von Trier acting as cameraman much of the time, and Björk appearing in almost all of the movie's scenes, the intensity mounted. It's true that at one point Björk walked off the set, but only because she felt her music was being mutilated, as truncated versions of her songs were cut for choreography-blocking purposes. "On my own albums, each song usually has 20 separate music tracks," she says. "On this movie, it's like 110- the 80-piece orchestra, and then each song has 40 tracks of on-location noises. During production, the crew would chop the songs up, because they, say, needed 11 more seconds of the dancers doing swirls. When I had 100 Danish people telling me to stop being so fussy about chopping up music that I've spent so many months on, I walked out." The manifesto she produced during her five-day protest demanded that other actors' musical vocals not be recorded without her on the set - costar Catherine Deneuve sings on one of the tracks - and that music- related changes not be made without her approval. Von Trier, though unsympathetic, relented - mainly, he says, because of financial pressures to keep the production on schedule and budget. "I don't think waiting five days in a hotel room did anyone any good," he says. "It's a situation I would not put my worst enemy in. It was killing creativity." "I was hired to do the music in the film," Björk responds, "and hired to say if something isn't working. That's what I did. And at Cannes, when I saw the crew people again, they said, 'I'm so happy you fixed those things, because we didn't realize what was going on!'" Björk now seems anxious to move on from the whole matter. She spent the summer immersed in her music, living and working in New York - a first for the singer, who usually divides her time between England and Iceland. She plans to complete her next record, tentatively titled Domestika, in time for a spring 2001 release. But like it or not, this week Björk finds herself back in the dreaded cinematic limelight, no doubt receiving applause for an acting career she says she has no desire to continue - but definitely does not regret. "I think it's important to communicate with your opposites," she says of working with Von Trier. "If you find a place where you both agree, then the more different you are, the more human that place is going to be. True? Yeah. So I consider it a victory." Dancer in the Dark is showing in theaters now.