05/07/2005

Thomas Vinterberg has made his name known as the co-founder of Dogma and built his fame with the hugely successful film Festen back in 1998. But the 36-year-old Danish, while in the Karlovy Vary Film Festival to present his newest film Dear Wendy based on a script by fellow Dane Lars Von Trier, admitted that his previous success starts to be a burden rather than the blessing it was seven years ago.

Is Dear Wendy just another violent film whose purpose is to insult the gun culture?
Lars [Von Trier] intended, I believe, this to be a love story of people with their guns; let’s say that he found another way of being politically incorrect as he likes it. He wanted to tease the culture, not insult. But I’m afraid that [the American public] will not see it that way; somehow I feel that we have built an unnecessary barrier between us and them with Dear Wendy.

Would you say that you are more fascinated by US based stories rather than let’s say Danish or European stories?
I’m deeply fascinated by matters close to home, too; but somehow home is also the US, at least at 60 percent! I mean I personally grew up watching American movies and Sean Penn, with a basketball cap and Coca-Cola. Let’s face it, America is the primary gasoline of world filmmaking and the primary frontier of so-called Western society… I don’t see any wrong in that…

The success of Festen surely helped you in your career. But do you still enjoy it?
A filmmaker should move on. Festen was done, was successful, thanks for that, but now it's over. I think that a filmmaker should ‘live’ with a project, travel and promote it for three years. Then he has to move on. You can take up your posters at Cannes and be happy with it. But then you should take them down. I was raised to be humble but this business doesn’t allow for that kind of thing. Everybody still talks about the Dogma. I say “stop, I need to reinvent myself”, start making films the way I used to make them, without the fuss around it before hand.

Go back to being really independent?
Not by the meaning that is currently attached to the word. I’ve watched a lot of independent filmmakers making films that in reality are applications for later Hollywood productions, waiting at the corner to see if [Hollywood] will appreciate their work and secure them a future. No, thanks…

Do you have a new film on the works?
Yes, but I’m not good in pitching scripts, you know. It’s a story about a pure man meeting a corrupted man… They both sleep with the same women… I don’t know, watch the film!