Lars von Trier stoically put in an appearance at the Venice Film Festival via video link on Thursday for the premiere of his upcoming series the Kingdom Exodus, making his first international appearance since announcing in August that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
The Oscar-nominated, Cannes Palme d’Or winning Danish director said he was feeling better following his diagnosis.
“I am doing good, but the shaking will take some time to fight. I’m feeling better but a little bit more stupid than I used to be so that says a lot,” he said to applause from the press corps.
The Kingdom Exodus, the third and final instalment of von Trier’s rebooted 1990s cult supernatural TV show The Kingdom is already creating strong buzz ahead of its Out of Competition screening on Thursday.
The trilogy initially began in the 1990s and is set in a hospital built on top of the old bleaching ponds in Copenhagen, where evil has taken root.
Von Trier revealed that he had become aware he was ill during the shooting of the series.
“I didn’t know that I was already ill when we started filming with this Parkinson’s I got. I had a rotten time but I hope the actors didn’t notice. I have been very happy for the support of all the actors,” he said.
Quizzed on whether he thought the first season had been ahead of its time and how the new one compared, von Trier said the original show had been made under very different conditions.
“The first episode we made, we had very little time and very little money and this time, I think I worked on this one for three and a half years. How can I compare them? I feel older of course because it was 25 years ago,” he said.
The director said he wanted to avoid what he considered to be the “failure” of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny And Alexander, which was released first as a three-hour feature in 1982 and then as a mini-series in 1983.
“I had seen all Bergman’s films and I was definitely a fan and then it seemed to me that he took the peaks from the films and his whole career and put it into one film that was very broad and very popular.”
He revealed that he had not tried to connect the new season perfectly with the previous two seasons.
“I didn’t sit down and watch the old ones,” he explained. “I was trying to get rid of the ties from the old stuff and I only thought about the characters. I was not trying to do something that was modern. I was not trying to revive. When I was writing the whole thing, it was a pure joy. If you go through you will see there are a lot of mistakes but I hope it has life.”
The show is being represented physically in Venice by producer Louise Vesth and cast members Bodil Jørgensen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro and Ida Engvoli who attended the press conference in person.
The show is being represented physically in Venice by Zentropa producer Louise Vesth and cast members Bodil Jørgensen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro and Ida Engvoli who attended the press conference in person.
Jørgensen, who plays a sleepwalking woman called Karen at the heart of the new season, explained that she regarded her new role as a continuation of her first collaboration with von Trier in the 1998 feature The Idiots, in which she also played a woman called Karen.
“In my world, I’m the same woman, 30 years older. For an actor to revive things after so many years and then with Lars you don’t get these experiences much in an actor’s life. it has been fantastic and I am very proud of the result,” she told the press conference.
The actress recalled the shoot over the winter months of January and February in Copenhagen’s real-life Rigshospitalet hospital, which is known locally as Riget and translates as ‘realm’ or “kingdom” in English.
“They were fantastic nights and days we had there, for all of the crew and cast with Lars in front. It was a happy time for me. The Kingdom is a beautiful place to tell these stories. I gave birth to children there and we die there and the rest are the spirits.’”
The Kingdom Exodus is due to premierr in Denmark on Viaplay on October 9 and will then air on DR at a later date. Danish sales powerhouse TrustNordisk has also sold the show into a raft of international territories.
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