ZENTROPA ENTERTAINMENTS8 APS presents
DOGVILLE
Written & Directed by LARS VON TRIER
Starring:
NICOLE KIDMAN, Harriet Andersson, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Marc Barr, Paul Bettany, Blair Brown, James Caan, Patricia Clarkson, Jeremy Davies, Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, John Hurt, Željko Ivanek, Udo Kier, Cleo King, Miles Purinton, Bill Raymond, Chloë Sevigny, Shauna Shim, Stellan Skarsgård
Produced by VIBEKE WINDELØV
Production Notes
RUNNING TIME: 2h58
OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
Im Verleih vonMedienbetreuung
Monopole Pathé FilmsEsther Bühlmann
Neugasse 6, PostfachPostfach 708
8031 Zürich8025 Zürich
Tel. 01 277 70 83Tel. 01 261 08 57
SHORT SYNOPSIS
The beautiful fugitive, Grace (Nicole Kidman), arrives in the isolated township of Dogville on the run from a team of gangsters. With some encouragement from Tom (Paul Bettany), the self-appointed town spokesman, the little community agrees to hide her and in return, Grace agrees to work for them. However, when a search sets in, the people of Dogville demand a better deal in exchange for the risk of harbouring poor Grace and she learns the hard way that in this town, goodness is relative. But Grace has a secret and it is a dangerous one. Dogville may regret it ever began to bare its teeth...SYNOPSIS
This is the sad tale of the township of Dogville, in the Rocky Mountains, up where the road came to its definitive end near the entrance to the abandoned silver mine. The residents of Dogville were good, honest folk and they liked their town.
The house in which Tom (Paul Bettany) lived was the best – in good times it might almost have passed for presentable. Tom’s father (Phillip Baker Hall) had been a doctor and now received a modest pension. Tom was a writer, but in order to postpone the day when he would have to put pen to paper in earnest, he had come up with a series of town meetings on the subject of moral rearmament.
Every evening at seven, when Martha (Siobhan Fallon) chimed the hour, Tom headed to the Henson home in order to inflict upon his childhood friend Bill (Jeremy Davies) yet another humiliating defeat at checkers. Some folks might say the opportunity to meet Bill’s older sister Liz (Chloe Sevigny) was more of a draw than the checkerboard and they might be right.
That night as Tom strolled home through Elm Street (a sentimental soul from the East Coast had once dubbed their main street “Elm Street” though no Elm tree had ever cast its shadow in Dogville) he heard gun shots in the valley below. Tom sat down on the old lady’s bench to think but was roused from this activity by the sound of Moses barking, as if the dog were standing face to face with a force to be taken seriously. Her name was Grace (Nicole Kidman). She hadn’t chosen Dogville from a map or sought out the township for a visit but Tom felt right away that she belonged. When a carload of armed men arrived in pursuit of the beautiful fugitive, Tom hid her away and told the gangsters that he had seen nothing out of the ordinary.
At the town meeting the following day, Tom provided a quick summary of the events of the previous evening to the astonished people of Dogville before going down to the mine to retrieve the fugitive from her hideaway. It was decided that Grace would be allowed to stay for two weeks.
In order to win the trust of the townsfolk, Tom proposed that Grace be put to work. Although everyone protested that they did not need any help, Tom was certain that Grace’s services would soon be in demand. However, Grace’s interview with Jack McKay (Ben Gazzara) proved sadly symptomatic of the attitude of the good people of Dogville. Jack had expressed his ‘no’ concisely and precisely. With Tom’s encouragement, Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall) grudgingly allowed Grace to tend to the wild gooseberry bushes behind her general store. Grace persisted and slowly but surely, all of the residents of Dogville found they had some work for her after all.
It was in complete silence that the people of Dogville turned up for the meeting at the mission house - two weeks to the day that the beautiful fugitive had come to town. Grace was sent out to await the verdict of the townsfolk. She listened as the bell chimed once for each vote allowing her to stay.
Spring and early summer proved a happy time for Grace. The town had agreed that everyone was to give according to his abilities and she received wages for her chores - not much, but enough to save up for the first of the tiny china figurines from the row of seven that had stood for so long gathering dust in the window of the store. At the annual Fourth of July picnic, Grace and Tom shyly declared their love for one another.
One day, when Grace was in the orchard helping Chuck (Stellan Skarsgaard) the police came to Dogville and put up a wanted poster. That the gangsters had fixed to have charges made against Grace in their efforts to neutralize her came as no surprise. But Dogville began to bare its teeth.
Suddenly, Grace was working all hours. She was scolded by Ma Ginger for taking a shortcut through the gooseberry bushes. Jack McKay allowed his hand to linger on her thigh; Chuck took advantage of her in the apple orchard. Chuck and Vera’s boy, Jason, demanded a spanking from poor Grace and having received his punishment, promptly betrayed her. But Grace had finally saved up enough money to purchase the last of the little china figurines in Ma Ginger’s window.
Vera (Patricia Clarkson), Liz and Martha visited Grace to air their grievances against her. Grace was restrained by Liz and Martha as Vera smashed each and every one of Grace’s beloved, hard-won china figurines.
Tom persuaded Grace that she should escape from Dogville with the help of the simple trucker, Ben (Zelko Ivanec). Instead of taking Grace down the mountain, Ben took advantage of her in the back of his truck and returned to Dogville with the fugitive hidden under a tarp. Grace’s plan to escape was exposed and Tom did not come to her defense when it was discovered that Tom Edison Sr.’s considerable stash of money had disappeared. The good people of Dogville decided to prevent her running away again and Grace was attached by Moses’ collar to a rusty old flywheel that she dragged behind her on a heavy chain.
With the exception of Tom who bitterly denied himself, all the menfolk of Dogville now took to visiting Grace at night and forcing themselves on her. Tom saw everything and it pained him.
Another town meeting was convened and Grace told her side of the story, simply and without embellishment. But the townsfolk were not receptive to her argument and Tom, fearing that he too might be driven out of their good favor if he continued in his support of Grace, took drastic measures. Before returning to the meeting that night, Tom opened the little drawer he hadn’t opened since the night of Grace’s arrival, took out the gangster’s card and made a telephone call.
And then it was as if Dogville just waited. Even the wind dropped, leaving the town in an unfamiliar calm. From the moment when they’d finally heard the vehicles starting one after the other from the direction of the edge of the woods, things moved rapidly. Tom had arranged a delegation to provide a proper reception. Dogville might be off the beaten track but it was hospitable nevertheless.
As for Grace, well, she was no expert in exclusive automobiles, but she recognized with no difficulty the purr of the Cadillac as it rounded the corner and made its way into the township of Dogville…
INTERVIEW: LARS VON TRIER ON DOGVILLE
Two things inspired me to write “Dogville”. First of all, I went to Cannes with “Dancer in the Dark” and I was criticized by some American journalists for making a film about the USA without ever having been there. This provoked me because, as far as I can recall, they never went to Casablanca when they made “Casablanca”. I thought that was unfair so I decided then and there that I would make more films that take place in America. That was one thing.
Then I was listening to “Pirate Jenny”, the song by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill from “The Threepenny Opera”. It’s a very powerful song and it has a revenge theme that I liked very much.
The film needed to be set in an isolated place because “Pirate Jenny” takes place in an isolated town. I decided that Dogville would be in the Rocky Mountains because if you have never been there, that sounds fantastic. What mountains aren’t rocky? Does that mean these ones are particularly rocky? It sounds like a name you might invent for a fairytale. And I decided that it would take place during the Depression because I thought that would provide the right atmosphere.
The old, black and white US government photographs taken during the Depression were certainly inspiring, but I never entertained the idea of making the film in black and white. It’s another way of putting a filter between you and the audience, another way of stylizing. If you’re making a film where you go ‘strange’ in one direction (you only have outlines of houses on the floor, for instance) then everything else should be ‘normal’. If you put too many layers on, it takes the audience further and further away from the film. It’s important not to do too many things at the same time or you scare people away. I work a bit like you do in a lab, I experiment. When you’re making an experiment, it’s important not to change more than one factor at a time.
I’ve been told that Americans might be reminded of “Our Town” and someone gave me the Wilder play to read while we were filming. I don’t think, however, that there are any similarities in the story. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t inspired by anything, of course I was. I was inspired, for example, by some of the televised plays I saw in the seventies, and in particular, by the Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Nicholas Nickleby”. It was extremely stylized, with audience participation and all these very seventies things, but when you see it today, it still works very well. In general, I was inspired by the fact that I miss theater on television. It was very popular when I was young. They’d take a piece from the theater and put it in other surroundings or it was very abstract sometimes. I’m not so crazy about theater in the theater but on television or on film, it’s really something you want to see.
I was also inspired to a degree by Bertolt Brecht and his kind of very simple, pared-down theater. My theory is that you forget very quickly that there are no houses or whatever. This makes you invent the town for yourself but more importantly, it makes you zoom in on the people. The houses are not there so you can’t be distracted by them and the audience doesn’t miss them after a time because of this agreement you have with them that they will never arrive.
What do I say to those who say it’s not cinema? I say they might be right. But of course I wouldn’t say that it’s ‘anti-cinema’ either. At the beginning of my career, I made very ‘filmic’ films. The problem is that now, it has become too easy – all you have to do is buy a computer and you have filmic. You have armies rampaging over mountains, you have dragons. You just push a button. I think it was okay to be filmic when, for instance, Kubrick had to wait two months for the light on the mountain behind Barry Lyndon when he was riding towards us. I think that was great. But if you only have to wait two seconds and then some kid with a computer fills it in… It’s another art form, I’m sure, but I’m not interested. I don’t see armies going over mountains, I only see some youngster with a computer saying, “Let’s do this a little more tastefully, let’s put some shadows in, let’s bleach the colours out a little”. It’s extremely well done and it doesn’t move me at all. It feels like manipulation to a degree that I don’t want to be manipulated.
Maybe it’s because I’m older now. When I was younger, I probably would have thought all this computer-generated stuff was fantastic. Now that I’m older, I have to be stubborn. That’s why I started going back to the old virtues and the old values. If you’re stubborn enough, then anything can have its own aesthetic. There’s a limit to how nice a film should look. If it looks too nice, I throw up. I actually see it a little bit like watching a magician. When a magician does little things. with coins for instance, you’re completely fascinated. But when he moves the Eiffel Tower then you say, “So what?”
“Dogville” takes place in America but it’s only America as seen from my point of view. I haven’t restricted myself in the sense that I said, ‘Now I have to research this and this and this’. It’s not a scientific film and it’s not a historical film. It’s an emotional film. Yes, it’s about the United States but it’s also about any small town anywhere in the world.
I wrote the script in Danish but I asked the English translator to try to keep the Danish language in somehow, not to make it too perfect. That’s my Kafka thing, I suppose – I’d like to keep this foreign eye. I’d be interested, for example, to see a film about Denmark by someone who had never been there. A Japanese person, for instance, or an American. This person would then be a mirror of what Denmark stood for without ever actually having been there. In my ‘American’ films, I mirror what information comes to me and my feelings about that information. Of course, it isn’t the truth because I’ve never been there (although I must say, I am better informed about the USA than the people who made “Casablanca” were about Casablanca). Obviously, a Japanese person making a film about Denmark wouldn’t have the same kind of information at his fingertips that I have because 90% of what you see on Danish television is American productions, but then he’d have to do some research and that, for me, would make it an interesting film.
In addition to the countless American programmes on Danish television, there is also a lot of news because America is the biggest power in the world. There’s a lot of criticism, too. In my youth, we had some big demonstrations against the World Bank and the Vietnam War and we all turned out to throw rocks at embassies. Well, at one embassy… But I don’t throw rocks anymore. Now I just tease.
I learned when I was very small that if you are strong, you also have to be just and good, and that’s not something you see in America at all. I like the individual Americans I know very much, but this is more of an image of a country I do not know but that I have a feeling about. I don’t think that Americans are more evil than others but then again, I don’t see them as less evil than the bandit states Mr Bush has been talking so much about. I think that people are more or less the same everywhere. What can I say about America? Power corrupts. And that’s a fact. Then again, since they are so powerful, it’s okay to tease because I can’t harm America, right?
The idea behind Grace’s treatment at the hands of the townspeople was that if you present yourself to others as a gift, then that is dangerous. The power that this gives people over the individual corrupts them. If you give yourself away, it will never work. You have to have some limits. I think that the people of Dogville were okay until Grace came along, just as I’m sure that America would a beautiful, beautiful country if there were nothing there but millionaires playing golf. It would be a wonderful, peaceful society but that’s not how it is, as far as I’m told. There are unfortunately a lot of losers there, too.
When you invent characters you take somebody you know and put them in new situations. So the people of Dogville are all Danes, they’re actually real people. You then take yourself - your own character - and you split it up between the two or three people who more or less carry the story (in this case, Tom and Grace). I can defend all of the characters in the film but Grace and Tom are the ones who portray me to some degree.
Does this mean that I see myself in Tom? Oh, yes. Very often people start off with very good intentions, especially artists, but then they themselves become more and more important and their cause recedes into the background. Sometimes, they lose sight of it completely. So I’d say that Tom, to a certain extent, is a self-portrait. It’s not very nice and it’s not very flattering but I suppose it comes close to the truth. He tries so hard and he never gets the girl…He’s the only one who doesn’t get the girl…