Quote
"The thing about making [Dancer in the Dark] that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I cant take it, because Im pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said, What did you expect? All major directors are sexist; a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female–male equality. My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick, and still they are the one[s] that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Triers case it is not so, and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming, and hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up [so] that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this soul-robbery. Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that."
Björk