Throwback Thursday: "Bjork's Big Adventure"

So I’ve been spru­cing up my CV and seek­ing oth­er kinds of work and aven­ues for work. “You should pitch more inter­views and pro­files,” is some­thing I’ve heard, and I agree, but I’m kind of cut off from the world of actu­ally get­ting access, which is some­thing I have to work on. In my dig­gings I remembered this pro­file of Bjork, from the October 2000 U.S. edi­tion of Première, a story that pre­ven­ted me from attend­ing the Moscow Film Festival. In spite of its argu­ably affected use of present tense, I think it works pretty well. Editors! Do you want more of this? Get in touch!

The text is after the graph­ic. I don’t think I knew the piece was a cov­er story in so many inter­na­tion­al editions. 

Björk Gudmundsdottir is a very pro­fes­sion­al inter­viewee. Led to a corner booth at a styl­ish Indian res­taur­ant in Manhattan, she is polite but not at all pally as intro­duc­tions are made. She sits upright, her back straight, almost stiff, adopt­ing a busi­ness­like demean­or that’s some­what at odds with the Barbie-pink midiskirt-and-jacket ensemble she’s wear­ing. She’s small, but not nearly as tiny as one might ima­gine. In per­son she def­in­itely does­n’t look, oh, 12, as she some­times does in her music videos, but she sure does­n’t look 34 either. And there’s noth­ing elfin or eth­er­e­al or mad­cap or kooky (or—what’s that word they all use to describe artists like Björk?—oh, yeah, quirky) about her.

She’s great at answer­ing ques­tions. She’ll take one and just run with it, take it to the end of its thread, so that by the time she’s through talk­ing you can pretty much just toss your three follow-up ques­tions. On the sub­ject of mak­ing a film versus mak­ing an album, for example, the pion­eer­ing rock musi­cian has this to say: “It seems to me that people who make films are very logic­al and they talk a lot. I’m not diss­ing them in any way, but it’s just dif­fer­ent; they’re very out­go­ing and it’s very above-waist, and music is very below-waist, if you see what I’m say­ing. If you want to write a song with someone, you would nev­er say, ‘See you at 4 on Monday, and the song’ll be done at 4:30.’  It’s like the only way a song could not hap­pen. You may spend a week with the per­son and get drunk and end up hitch­hik­ing through France and then on the train back you write a whole album in a half an hour. That’s more how music is made.”

She is here mainly to talk about Dancer in the Dark, which she refers to as “the first and last movie I ever acted in” – a delib­er­ately inac­cur­ate state­ment, because she did in fact act in a Bergmanesque, Icelandic-made drama called The Juniper Tree, back in 1987, and had a cameo in Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter). But, she says, “I was not present [for Juniper Tree]; I had just had a baby, I was inside this bubble, it was the most gor­geous peri­od of my life. With Dancer in the Dark, I gave all and more.” Indeed, she adds, “My friends came over to vis­it me [on the set] and did­n’t recog­nize me. They wor­ried about my men­tal health, because they’d nev­er seen me like that.”

This aston­ish­ing film—a some­times vérité-looking hybrid of music­al and melo­drama that either bril­liantly or per­versely denies its audi­ence the usu­al pleas­ures of those genres and instead strives for high tragedy—was the talk of this year’s Cannes film fest­iv­al, win­ning the Palme d’or for its dir­ect­or, Lars Von Trier and a Best Actress award for Björk. It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that the film could not exist without Björk’s per­form­ance, as Selma, a poor immig­rant fact­ory work­er toil­ing away in a bleakly ima­gined America, sav­ing money for an oper­a­tion that will spare her son from the same mys­ter­i­ous ail­ment that’s rob­bing her of her own eye­sight. Despite an inter­na­tion­al cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare, David Morse, and Joel Grey, the Cannes buzz was all about her por­tray­al, which reduced many in the audi­ence to tears. Odd, then, that here’s a woman with very little tra­di­tion­al act­ing exper­i­ence who gets asked to carry an extremely ambi­tious motion pic­ture, hits one out of the park, and then announces that she’ll nev­er act again. Something must be up.

Perhaps it was col­lab­or­at­ing with Von Trier. The Danish dir­ect­or is known for his unusu­al work­ing meth­ods. (For his pre­vi­ous film, The Idiots, he had his act­ors par­ti­cip­ate in an unsim­u­lated orgy; on the Dancer set, he some­times prac­tic­ally pushed his hand­held video cam­era into the act­ors’ faces.) It was widely repor­ted that Björk stormed off the Dancer set at least once. A video mon­it­or smashed in the heat of anger has been mentioned.

Björk does­n’t deny there was ten­sion. But she insists it’s not the reas­on she’s renoun­cing act­ing. “What was going on on the set was noth­ing com­pared to the work that went into the music,” she says, “and nobody said one word about that.” When she heard about the Cannes award, she says, “I imme­di­ately thought it was for the music. And when they told me it was for the act­ing, my feel­ing was, ‘I don’t want to sound ungrate­ful, but it’s not where my heart is.’ My heart def­in­itely belong­sto sound.”

Sound is where her heart has belonged for at least a quarter of a cen­tury. The Icelandic-born sing­er made her first record at the age of 11, and her music­al career was into its second dec­ade when the band she fron­ted, the anarch­ic new wave combo the Sugarcubes, made an inter­na­tion­al splash in 1988. Her solo-career, which began in 1993 with the some­what iron­ic­ally titled Debut, has seen her con­tin­ue to col­lab­or­ate with some of the most forward-thinking, and some­times seem­ingly unlikely, cre­at­ors in the European music community.

Then again, any­one who has fol­lowed Björk’s life and career knows to expect the unex­pec­ted. She has often presen­ted a per­sona that can seem more than a little loopy. On her first solo hit she sang, “There’s def­in­itely def­in­itely def­in­itely no logic to human beha­vi­or,” and her per­son­al life would seem to fol­low that dictum. She was once romantic­ally linked to a weird-looking dude with gold teeth (drum ‘n’ bass pion­eer Goldie). And did­n’t she pound the crap out of some report­er in Bangkok once? Similarly, Von Trier, whose mem­or­ably off-kilter works also include Zentropa and the defin­it­ively deranged Danish TV_miniseries The Kingdom, and who cofoun­ded the ascet­ic film movement/practical joke known as Dogma 95, enjoys play­ing the eccent­ric (among oth­er things, he really has no “Von” in his name, but reportedly appen­ded one there as a kind of homage to not-quite-normal auteurs von Stroheim and von Sternberg). And then there’s the fact that Björk’s role in the movie, as the ulti­mate self-sacrificing mom, would be a bear for even the most seasoned act­ress to handle. It could be argued that no movie has deman­ded so much of its lead act­ress since, well, Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, but really, there’s no reas­on to stop there. No movie has deman­ded so much of its lead act­ress since Carl Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc, a pic­ture Von Trier clearly reveres, a pic­ture that so utterly defined its lead act­ress, Maria Falconetti, that she, in fact, nev­er made anoth­er film. Hmmm.

That’s such a tidy ana­logy that one can­’t help but ima­gine there’s a deep­er story behind this no-more-acting vow. But Björk insists there isn’t. She char­ac­ter­izes the atmo­sphere on the set of Dancer as “bril­liant.” When told this, Von Trier him­self asks, “Yeah, okay, but what does that mean?” Bjork calls Von Trier’s often – vérité style “geni­us.” Still, she’d be the first to admit that “going through what Selma was going through was very pain­ful. It was pain­ful just to wake up in the morn­ing.” And she likens act­ing in Dancer to “sign­ing on to war, going to the Vietnam War. I believed I might die. Acting is like jump­ing from a cliff without a parachute.”

For his part, Von Trier says, “I felt like a police­man who had to force Björk to do some­thing she really did­n’t want to do all the time. It was not pleas­ant at all, and I don’t think she could have said it was pleasant.”

“She can­not really act—she can just be.” That’s what Catherine Deneuvesaid about her cost­ar Björk at Cannes. Good quote—very dra­mat­ic and myth­mak­ing and all that, but it’s a bit of a crock non­ethe­less. Certainly, some of her cost­ars are pretty con­vinced that she has the stuff to be a movie star, if she so desired. “You can­’t do what she did on that pic­ture without being a good act­ress,” says Joel Grey (Cabaret), who plays a tap-dancing tri­al wit­ness in Dancer. David Morse, who por­trays Selma’s vil­lain­ous neigh­bor and whose exchanges with Selma make up some of the film’s most shock­ing scenes, says that Björk became the char­ac­ter “in the way she had to exper­i­ence things. For instance, I don’t think she’s ever picked up a gun in her life. So to bring her­self to do these things that were deeply, genu­inely repuls­ive to her – she could­n’t pre­tend to do them. But I think she truly has the instincts of an actress.”

“I agree that I’m very instinct-driven,” Björk says. “That’s just the way I am. And when Lars con­vinced me to act the [part], he asked me not to act. Acting was bad; that’s what pro­fes­sion­als do. I had to become the girl. That was fine with me, because I’m not inter­ested in being technical.”

So, when people speak of what she can or can­not do, she does­n’t take it as an insult, but as a com­pli­ment. It’s like she’s a magi­cian who’s really sold her trick. The craft-versus-instinct thing is some­thing she’s always aware of; she speaks of her grand­fath­er, who is a car­penter, and how some­times they’ll get togeth­er and he’ll show her a pic­ture of a fire­place he’s built, and she’ll play him her latest record, and they’ll both appre­ci­ate their accom­plish­ments on the same level. Dancer’s bizarre, impres­sion­ist­ic­ally lit music­al num­bers, which Selma con­jures up to escape from—or com­ment on—her dreary exist­ence, have more than a little in com­mon with the video Björk made with Being John Malkovich dir­ect­or Spike Jonze for the song “It’s Oh So Quiet,” in which she cavorts around a tire store. Von Trier (who cites Jonze’s video as his inspir­a­tion for cast­ing Björk in Dancer) breaks out of his quasi-documentary mode for these music­al scenes; they were shot with 100 fixed video cam­er­as, many of them hid­den from the act­ors’ view. The songs Björk wrote almost always take their cues from some repet­it­ive, mech­an­ic­al noise—the clank of tray-making machines, the turn­ing of train wheels—and then trans­mog­ri­fy into gor­geous, oth­er­worldly, some­times orches­tral soundscapes.

It’s the music-making aspect of the Dancer exper­i­ence that Björk is most pro­tect­ive of, most eager to hang on to. The much-cited instance where she stormed off the set was, she insists, over a dis­agree­ment about how the music was being edited to fit the pic­ture. “The con­flict was­n’t between me and Lars either; that’s anoth­er mis­un­der­stand­ing. It’s been exag­ger­ated a lot. I had been work­ing 16 hours a day, every day.” She is a little vague about who “they” are, but “they” appar­ently “were chan­ging the songs. I had done one and a half years of work with an 80-piece orches­tra, and then I’m work­ing on the set as an act­ress; I’d come home in the even­ing and they’d say, ‘Oh, they cut a minute out of the middle of some­thing,’ and I would say, ‘No, you can­’t do that; I’m ready to coöper­ate but you just can­’t do that…’ “No one who has­n’t actu­ally made a record has any idea just how much work goes into it—work that, as ful­filling as it can ulti­mately be, is often back­break­ing and tedi­ous. But that’s the work she lives for. “So I walked away and came back with a mani­festo, and they were all music­al things, such as, I had to have the  final say on the music because we had nev­er signed a contract—me and Lars, everything was based on trust—so I said, I have to do the final mix, the act­ors can­’t do the vocals without me…” It seems to be all she thinks about, this music, or music in gen­er­al. Even here in New York, months after Cannes, as she works on her next album, she says she’s been toy­ing with the audio mix for Dancer. For the CD of her Dancer music, which she has titled Selmasongs, she enlis­ted fel­low music­al risk-takers such as Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to sing in place of the act­ors, because, Björk says, “I see the album not as the soundtrack to the film but rather as the real­iz­a­tion of Selma’sdream. I want this record to be my gift to Selma.”

She does­n’t get quite so pre­ten­tious as to liken her music­al works to her chil­dren, but when she talks about her 14-year-old son, Sindri, and how much of Selma’s mater­nal instinct stems from her own life, you hear some par­al­lels. “The second time in my life that I was ever phys­ic­ally viol­ent was four years ago, when this woman in Thailand was try­ing to inter­view my son live on the air and she was crazily abus­ing it, and I just saw red and hit her. It’s a dif­fer­ent energy there when you want to pro­tect your chil­dren. I remem­ber after that, me and my son going to see Aliens, and there’s that line in there, ‘Get away from her, you bitch!’ And we were laugh­ing our heads off, because this had just happened to us!”

 Dancer in the Dark is in fact a dark film, and while Björk does­n’t seem to have any regrets about it, she’s very happy to be mov­ing on. “After being Selma for so long, it was great to go back to being Björk. There may still be a little Selma left in me.” Honestly, though, there does­n’t seem to be much. What’s left, it seems, is a woman who knows what she wants and will not let any­body tell her oth­er­wise. Agents, dir­ect­ors, screen­writers, take note: “If I’m lucky I’ve got 50 years left, and I should spend all of them on songs.” That, it seems, would pretty much be that. The exper­i­ence was appar­ently of the most value in terms of help­ing her estab­lish where, and what, she should be. “I’ve nev­er felt so lucky and so grate­ful as I am now,” she says. Her dance into the world of film led her to what she already knew. Her air of con­tent­ment expands when the inter­view con­cludes and the tape record­er is turned off, and Björk almost auto­mat­ic­ally relaxes, curls up her legs, and starts sampling, with great (and prac­tic­ally elfin) eager­ness, a tray of appet­izers that up until this point she has been very pro­fes­sion­ally ignoring.