Kirsten Dunst Discusses 'Melancholia' with About.com

Kirsten Dunst Discusses 'Melancholia'
By Rebecca Murray

Melancholia is gorgeous, well-acted, and off-beat - which could be the description of any film from the mind of Lars von Trier. In this 2011 end of the world tale, Kirsten Dunst plays a woman who gets married and leaves her new husband on their wedding night, all as a new planet (named Melancholia) continues on its collision course with Earth.

At the LA press day for the Magnolia Pictures release, Dunst was asked about working with Lars von Trier, a filmmaker who has a reputation for being difficult for actors to work with. "As soon as I read the email, like, 'Lars wants to talk to you. Read the script,' I was ecstatic," said Dunst. "These opportunities don’t come along very often. He’s one of the great auteurs of our time, and it’s like a month of shooting, how bad could it be? I’m pretty tough. I’ve dealt with plenty of directors now at this point, and I wasn’t afraid."

Not everyone feels that way about the prospect of being in a von Trier film however. Bjork, who worked with von Trier on 2000's Dancer in the Dark, has reportedly warned actors away from working with him. "But Bjork is a genius artist in herself, and when you get two together – not that I’m not a genius or anything – but she’s an incredible musician, they had to collaborate too on the film. I can’t imagine Lars collaborating with anybody else," explained Dunst. "It’s his world. So there’s going to be friction, and that made sense to me that there would be. And that’s the first and only time she acted, so who knows?"

Dunst added, "Lars also goes through different states of how he’s doing, and on Antichrist I know he was in kind of a dark place, and Charlotte [Gainsbourg, Dunst's co-star in Melancholia] was like, 'We were filming in Germany in the middle of nowhere and the food was terrible, and Lars couldn’t hold the camera, and he was shaking so much and not in a great place.' And on Melancholia he was in a really good place, she said. I talked to her about it, but I agreed to do the film before – you know..."

On her character's response to getting married:

Kirsten Dunst: "I don’t think that Justine knows the end of the world is coming when she’s at her wedding. I think that there’s something she senses, but I don’t think that’s what makes her depressed. I think that she’s gone through this a few times in her life, and I think that the wedding and the pressure of getting married and realizing that this man [played by Alexander Skarsgard] isn’t who she wants to be with is making her depressed, and there’s something else she’s longing for that’s not in her realm."

How could her character dump a man as hunky Alexander Skarsgard on their wedding night?:

Kirsten Dunst: "She’s pretty stupid. [Laughing] I’m a big True Blood fan. I watch the show, so when I first met Alex I was like, 'You’re my favorite vampire on True Blood!’ He’s really great. He’s a really great actor. Actually, he’s a really goofy guy in real life. He’s really funny and sweet. He’s very easy to work with, a really good actor."

On having two Skargards on the set:

Kirsten Dunst: "Between the two of them, they’re like brothers. They talk like they’re friends about everything. It feels like a very bro-relationship between them both, but Stellan is the man. He’s such an incredible actor, I love hanging out with him."

"Lars has a good group that comes back every time, and they’re the best people. Udo [Kier] and I went to dinner last night while everyone was watching the movie at AFI, and I really have good relationships with these people. We really got to know each other well. When you’re in the middle of nowhere, you really bond with everyone you’re working with."

Comparing von Trier to other directors she's worked with:

Kirsten Dunst: "I’ve worked with directors before where the camera’s moving, following you, but Lars is really pared down. We don’t even rehearse the scene; we just start shooting. It could just be like a scene in this room, and if there’s not much light, you figure out everything. It doesn’t feel so planned at all. I guess this is the most unplanned movie that I’ve been on, in terms of how we shoot."

On working with a director who doesn't believe in rehearsals:

Kirsten Dunst: "Every film set is a totally different energy. You don’t know what everyone’s going to be like, and you have to work within what you’re given. But, also, I do a lot of preparation before I start a movie, so I have all... Sorry, I lose my train of thought sometimes. To me, it gave me a lot of freedom, actually. I appreciated it. Being on Lars’ set is the best film school in the world."

On the darkness of the film and keeping things light when the cameras aren't rolling:

Kirsten Dunst: "I was playing Angry Birds in my trailer. You’ve got a light zone, you have to self-preserve, that’s part of it too. You don’t have to sit there and be depressed to play depressed. You actually should be in a good place to play depressed, I think. We moved pretty swiftly too, so there was definitely momentum. But Lars has a great sense of humor, too. He’d yell out, 'Stop acting!,' to people. We were making a very heavy thing and there were definitely days where there were the scenes I would have to prepare for, but also making a movie doesn’t have to be drudgery just because of the subject matter. But there was a lot of lightness, too."

On the hardest scene to film:

Kirsten Dunst: "Having sex on the golf course was so awkward. Because Lars doesn’t tell you at all how we’re going to do the scene, so I didn’t know if it was going to be very graphic. It says Justine basically rapes this kid, and so I was like, 'Oh my God!' I was so nervous in the trailer, me and Brady [Corbet], who’s now my friend, who was in the movie with me, were like, 'Oh my God, how’s he going to shoot this? Really close up? Am I going to take my wedding dress off? How’s it going to be seen?' And then we get to set, the camera’s so far away, and everything’s being shot from this really long distance. I was like, 'Thank God. Hallelujah!' That was the most nerve-wracking for me, just because it’s so awkward. I don’t know how I’m going to phase into sex scenes as an adult, because I also had one to do not that long ago, and it’s so awkward. It’s the worst. I hate them."

Was going dark in this film therapeutic?:

Kirsten Dunst: "Yeah. You don’t have an opportunity to do roles like this very often. At the end, it definitely feels cathartic. It should. All movies that I do, I feel like you’ve got to release some sides of yourself. The last movie I did was a comedy, and I got to play a real mean girl. I get so uncomfortable; I’m working on a script and I’m like, 'I just can’t...how am I going to...' It was difficult for me to think about where that comes from. But then you bring those things outside of yourself, and it’s fun to express those things. That’s part of why I like what I do."

On what she'd do if the world was coming to an end:

Kirsten Dunst: "Probably me and my family would just eat a bunch of great food, we’d probably cook a bunch, and drink some delicious champagne. What are you going to do if the end of the world’s coming? Better go out having fun, you know, than stressing about it, I guess."

On shooting the poster for the film while wearing a wedding dress and floating in water:

Kirsten Dunst: "That was difficult. It was pretty, but very uncomfortable. I like the hand poster better, because the one where I’m lying down, it’s such a weird angle to shoot someone’s face in when you’re trying to hold your head up, they have all these weird props. I wasn’t in a river; I was in a big bathtub, basically. All those things looked really beautiful."

On the process of selecting the right wedding dress for Melancholia:

Kirsten Dunst: "We wanted it to be a very Barbie wedding dress. Like a very traditional, out-of-the-magazine bride dress. He wanted to make it American-looking. Never been to America, he won’t fly here, he won’t get on planes - even in Cannes he took his Winnebago - but he’ll go in a helicopter that his friend can drive, and like, 'What if we took a boat over here to America with a helicopter on it, just in case, and a boat can follow just in case that one sinks or something happens to the helicopter?' He doesn’t want to come over here. I know that he doesn’t. Udo and I were joking last night that we’re going to drug him and get him on a plane to come over here, just to mess with him. We’ll put him in the middle of Times Square. He’d probably have a heart attack."

Could this role signal a new phase in her career?:

Kirsten Dunst: "I didn’t think about it that way because, yeah, when you get older you just have different opportunities. The roles are different and there’s more to do in them. When I found out I got this film I was doing a film called Upside Down and I was playing the ingénue. It was very Love Story, but it was such a beautiful and crazy world that this director Juan Solanas creates, that I wanted to be a part of it. But I’ll still play the girlfriend. That’s what a lot of the female roles are. But, hopefully, they’ll be in interesting movies."

On turning 30:

Kirsten Dunst: "It’s next year! I had such a fun party this last year because it was my grandma’s 90th, and we have the same birthday, so we threw a really nice party at my mom’s house. My friends who are musicians came and we had a band play, and it was like, so many different people getting up on stage and singing... I mean, not stage. We had it cornered off in the backyard - sounds bigger than it is. That was such a fun party that I don’t really know what I would do. One of my ideas was to take over that place, Deetjens, in Big Sur. Have my friends in it, put on a fun show at the Henry Miller Library, and have a party there and people playing music."

Will not being 20-something change things?:

Kirsten Dunst: "I don’t know. Hopefully not. It’s true, as you get older you just feel better about yourself and not as worried about what other people think of you in general. You just get more comfortable in your skin. I welcome 30, and I look young, so..."

She's a True Blood fan, so what does she think of Twilight?

Kirsten Dunst: "I think those movies are funny. I love them; they’re awesome. They’re hilarious, too! It’s like, so crazy, the first one was like, I mean, there were lines like, 'You’re like my own personal brand of heroin.' That’s a line. It’s like, 'This is the best movie ever!'"

And what about the new The Amazing Spider-Man?:

Kirsten Dunst: "I love Andrew Garfield and I think Emma Stone’s cute, too, so I think that they’re going to be really cute in the movie for sure. And they look like they have good chemistry."

And, surprisingly, she'd come back and do a cameo:

Kirsten Dunst: "I wanted to. I had the idea of – which I didn’t tell anyone – if Tobey and I were extras and we’d just walk by in the background."