The 'von' in Lars von Trier's name was his own invention
Lars Trier gave himself the aristocratic 'von' at 25, possibly mocking directors like Erich von Stroheim who had done the same. He went on to co-write the stripped-down Dogme 95 rules, build a studio that has sold over 350 million tickets, and win Cannes' top prize before the festival banned him.
Trier was born on 30 April 1956 in Kongens Lyngby, north of Copenhagen, and only learned from his dying mother that his biological father was Fritz Michael Hartmann, her former boss at the Ministry of Social Affairs and a wartime resistance fighter. He acted as a child in the Danish series Secret Summer, studied film theory at the University of Copenhagen and directing at the National Film School of Denmark, and took two student prizes in Munich at 25.
He likes to group his films into trilogies. The Europa set opened with The Element of Crime in 1984, which won the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, and closed with Europa in 1991. In 1992 he and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen founded Zentropa, named after a fictional railway in that film, and funded it partly with The Kingdom, a hospital miniseries shot at Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet. In 1995 he and Thomas Vinterberg issued Dogme 95, a manifesto banning studio lighting, sets, costumes and added music. Of his Golden Heart films about suffering, innocent heroines, only The Idiots fully met the Dogme rules; Dancer in the Dark, starring Björk, won the Palme d'Or in 2000.
His experiments kept coming. Dogville and Manderlay were staged on a bare soundstage with walls chalked on the floor. The Boss of It All used Automavision, letting a computer decide when a fixed camera would pan, tilt or zoom. The Depression trilogy, all starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, is said to reflect his own illness; Gainsbourg won Best Actress at Cannes for Antichrist, and Kirsten Dunst won it for Melancholia.
Controversy follows him. A donkey was killed during Manderlay's production, prompting John C. Reilly to quit, though the scene was cut. At the 2011 Melancholia press conference he joked about sympathising with Hitler; he apologised at once, but Cannes declared him persona non grata for a year. He has also been accused of mistreating actresses, Björk among them.
Source: Lars von Trier
