Hey folks, Harry here... after yet again another all nighter on my part. Sheesh... I haven't seen daylight in ... what's the date today? heh... Well, you may have remembered that Anton was in the midst of a fantastic interview with Jesper Jargil with his holo-transcriber wore out, and he promised part two and something about a gangbang (some sort of urban firecracker I think) so here it is.... However, if you happened to miss the first part of this... then, by all mean CLICK HERE, otherwise... move on down the page...
Jesper Jargil Interview Part Two
Anton Sirius: You've said this was a learning experience for you, and it inspired Lars to take up the camera. But were there any other parallels between Lars' shoot and your shoot going on simultaneously? Did you start noticing odd synchronicities taking place?
Jesper Jargil: Well, I'd decided from the beginning that I wanted it to be so you didn't know when I was into the Idiots and when I was into the documentary. It's the same camera, the same way, the same style. Because often when you see even good films about films you can say "Ah! Now you have a quote from the film" because it's a completely different style. But here it was really on purpose to not know. With my editor, though, she didn't agree. And when we transferred it for the TV version she made a little change so that in the video version we use quotes from the film transfer of the Idiots, so you can see a slight difference in the image quality of my takes and the quotes from the film. But you have to pay attention to pick that up. That was our compromise.
AS: So the Humiliated is finished, it's the finished print you showed here, or are you still tinkering with it a bit?
JJ: There's another version, twenty minutes shorter, for television. But we didn't make an essential version, we could still re-make it.
AS: Were there any logistic problems? I know when they were shooting the Idiots there were times when the cast just takes off and go their own ways, the gang bang scene in particular there are shots of people running out into the back yard. Was that all planned out in advance?
JJ: That was one day I chose to be… you see I shoot while he's directing these gang bang things, but there was one day, I felt because the scene is very pornographic, with penetration for maybe five, six seconds of the film, and when they were doing that everyone was very tense. These are professional actors. And the way it was shot is maybe not real Dogme style because they put in some professional pornographic actors, so the close-ups of penetration, these are the porno actors lying under and among the real actors. But this was very tense, for some of the actors this was really a very strange situation and I knew that if I went in there to film while they were doing it, that might have broken up the whole thing. I knew this was going too close. Even though I was allowed to I didn't want to ruin it for Lars, and when I felt that tenseness, not just here… I mean, I could make a half-hour documentary just of people yelling at me. Because a lot of scenes were improvised, and to be a documentary filmmaker I try not to be in the way, but sometimes things would suddenly change, they'd go around 180 degrees and there's me standing there in the shot, and Lars would go "Aaagh! I told you!" So I was one of the humiliated also.
AS: Did you learn anything surprising about Lars, having known him for so long, and here getting that intimately into his working habits?
JJ: I don't know if I learned anything about Lars, but I think I learned a lot about directing actors, and what's important, and how to get over… because that's what the Dogme rules are about, to get to a level which is more important than just professionalism. Because what happens is it's a game for the actors. You start with the actors and they are professional, but then you say "That's not enough", you put them to a point that they cannot use their professionalism any more, you go into their privacy and find things in themselves to come out. I don't know how to say it… Film is a seduction, and you should use the audience, you should use what comes out until you are seduced into embarrassment. It's about how far you can get in and catch these moments of truth. Lars just completed shooting a fantastic film, I think it's going to be his masterpiece, it's a musical called Dancer in the Dark. He wanted it to be called Taps, but that title is apparently taken…
AS: Yes, it's, um, a Gregory Hines film, the American dancer, I think.
JJ: Bjork is the lead star of this film. It's very interesting because on one side it's a very MTV, and more than MTV style, because all the dance numbers and singing numbers are shot with 100 cameras [note: Harmony Korine was on that set too and he disputes that figure, saying that he used 30 cameras for some scenes in julien donkey-boy and Lars is just trying to one-up him], specially designed DV cameras that have a special lens so that they can shoot Cinemascope so that use not just part of the image but the whole resolution of the camera, and the cameras are hidden in a special way. And there's a fantastic scene- story takes place in the '50s, in Washington state, but because Lars has his phobia it was shot in Sweden and in a studio in Copenhagen, but there's one dancing number- Bjork has made all the music, and she's this rock star- and the one scene there's a bridge, with this river coming down, and a train goes slowly over the bridge and all the dancers are on the wagons, and Bjork gets on and off the train while it's moving… it's wild. But that's just one part of it, these fantastic MTV-style things, but then the basic thing is that it's a melodrama, because Bjork's character wears these glasses that look like the bottom of a beer bottle, and she's going blind, and you look at her and say "Oh, she's so cute and sad!" and her son is going blind too and she's trying to collect money so he can have this operation and he won't be blind like her…
AS: Don't give away too much!
JJ: Yes. But because Bjork is not an actress…
AS: She's actually had a little bit of experience in Iceland.
JJ: But she's not a professional. But the way he worked with her is the way you see in the Humiliated, he builds her up and breaks her down and uses psychotherapy and there are all these scenes… this is a very expensive production, there's a team of 100 people, but when he shot these scenes with her everybody was away, just him and her and any other actors, and he sets up the camera and if a scene is only 30 seconds he might shoot it for three hours, and the whole production team, they stand outside and look at the monitors and you have these grown men just crying, because it's so moving what happens.
AS: It sounds like the work of, oh I can't think of his name, British filmmaker who did the Singing Detective and Pennies form Heaven… [note: It's Dennis Potter]
JJ: Ya ya ya ya ya! It's a terrible story, it ends with…
AS: Don't say how it ends!
JJ: It's not a happy ending, I'll say that.
AS: Were you at Cannes when the Idiots was screened? Was actually was the crowd reaction to it?
JJ: Well, it wasn't that it was a bad reaction, it just didn't get the prize. Lars' little brother got the jury prize, and Lars would never be content with that, he goes for the Palme d'Or every time. If he doesn't get the Palme d'Or for Dancer I think he might stop doing films. I think it's just another game between him and, what's his name, the fellow that runs Cannes, a little contest. If you're a runner, or a swimmer, it's part of the game to win. And the only Olympic Games for Lars is the Cannes festival. He called Polanski an idiot when he didn't get the Palme d'Or the year that Polanski headed the jury. He got the technical prize and the jury prize but he wanted the Palme d'Or.
AS: What have you got coming up, after your trilogy?
JJ: There's one more documentary I would like to do, and then I don't want to do any more. But I would like to do a documentary about the Estonian composer Avro Part. He doesn't know this, I've never met the man. But I know all his music and I think it's incredibly interesting. And for thirty years I have been writing on a feature that I want to do, based on a Danish novel. We had a Danish writer called Johannes V. Jensen, who got the Nobel prize in the '40s, and he made a book called the Fall of the King that was written exactly 100 years ago, and in coming up to the year 2000 two leading Danish newspapers asked all their readers, plus their critics, which was the greatest masterpiece written in Danish in the last 100 years? And this novel, which was written in 1900, won in both newspapers. Which is surprising because it's a historical novel, it takes place in 1492 and ends around 1530, and it's a very depressing book, it's about Danish history going downwards, downwards until we lose everything, because we used to be a big force, a big state, and the main character is a depressing, depressing character, who starts down here and then he dies as an old man at the end of the story and he's even more depressed
AS: So not a small project, for your first feature.
JJ: No, it's going to be the most expensive film ever made in Denmark. But before that I'm working on another feature which is not as ambitious as that one, which takes place in nowadays. And it's also an impossible love story. And then I would like- this is only partly serious because I don't think it's possible- but if your readers know someone who has lots of money… I would like to do the opera Don Giovanni Dogme-wise.
AS: Actually as an opera, or just the story itself?
JJ: As the opera. But not just in a theater, also to take the actors outside. You know the rules, you cannot do historical things, you can't mix in music afterwards…
AS: You'd have to update it.
JJ: Yes, but take it outside and also take the orchestra with me. If we were shooting here in this park and we'd have the orchestra there waiting to jump in when we were doing a scene right there. I'd like to do that very much, and I know how to do it. But it is kind of expensive to have a whole orchestra, and a group of singers…
AS: Just sort of wandering around. An on-call orchestra!
