Stellan Skarsgard has been through a lot with director Lars von Trier. He’s one of the few actors to collaborate with the Danish filmmaker who keeps coming back for more. But will be bare it all for Von Trier’s planned pornographic feature, Nymphomaniac?
The actor, who appears alongside Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the Cannes hit Melancholia, tells E! News that Von Trier has asked Skarsgard to play the lead in a film that would explore a woman’s sexual drive from birth to age 50.
Speaking from Berlin, Von Trier says he has been interviewing all of the women he knew as a younger man, and is finding them to be very vocal about their needs and desires. “If you take a woman of 50 or 60 who has been sexually active, they will talk for hours,” he said. “And this is fantastic, it's a pleasure and I smile all the way, and that's why I want to extend the research time. You have no idea how dirty the female mind is!”
Von Trier first floated the idea of making a porno at Cannes, when he told journalists gathered at a Melancholia press conference that he wanted to shoot a film with Dunst that would include “very, very unpleasant sex.” But the line was overshadowed by the Nazi comments the controversial director uttered later in the presser. That’s the beauty of Lars. Only he could overshadow talk of a graphic porno with Nazi sympathizing.
The challenge, if you ask me, will be finding a woman to act in the film. Outside of Gainsbourg, very few women agree to work for Von Trier a second time. Nicole Kidman, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bjork and Emily Watson are just a few of the names who’ve headlined Von Trier films, only to never work with him again. And this project sounds so explicit. Who can he lure to the production? Will it ever get made? And more importantly, will any distributor touch it with a 10-foot pole?
