Top 50 Lars Von Trier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Political correctness kills discussion.”

— Lars Von Trier

2. “I am the best film director in the world.”

— Lars Von Trier

3. “Everything is going to hell, but we should smile all the way.”

— Lars Von Trier

4. “If you want to provoke, you should provoke someone who is stronger than you, otherwise you are misusing your power.”

— Lars Von Trier

5. “I’m very proud of being persona non grata. I’ve never been that before in my life, and that suits me extremely wellI’m known for provocations, but I like provocations when they have a purpose. And this had no purpose whatsoever. Because I’m not Mel Gibson. I’m definitely not Mel Gibson.”

— Lars Von Trier

6. “If anyone would like to hit me, they are perfectly welcome. I must warn you, though, that I might enjoy it. So maybe it’s not the right kind of punishment.”

— Lars Von Trier

7. “I am crazy about time cuts. I have a theory that the audience tie everything together so they don’t see time cuts but the time cuts give us the possibility of jumping in time, which means a psychological evolution can be cut down.”

— Lars Von Trier

8. “Only a fool does not fear actors, but you can’t beat them, and if you can’t beat them, join them, as they say. As I’ve got older I’ve become very interested in that part of the work.”

— Lars Von Trier

9. “I am crazy about my own films. The films I’ve just made I’m crazy about them. But then I don’t see them for many years. It’s like when you get a new child you’re very crazy about this child but then after a few years you’re like, “what was its name again?””

— Lars Von Trier

10. “I think that limitations are the most important part of any art form.”

— Lars Von Trier

11. “I grew up in a culturally radical home, where strong emotions were forbidden.”

— Lars Von Trier

12. “I am a man who likes to control things, and if I can’t control them totally I will not control them at all.”

— Lars Von Trier

13. “My films generally center around thousands of pictures being flashed in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion.”

— Lars Von Trier

14. “Evil gives you far more strings to pull. But I must say that I have never been interested in the psychology of evil, not in the slightest. Perhaps I’m not interested in evil, but in the dark sides of human beings.”

— Lars Von Trier

15. “I am very romantic about communism even still, but I know terrible things happened.”

— Lars Von Trier

16. “If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.”

— Lars Von Trier

17. “I think it’s a very strange question that I have to defend myself. I don’t feel that. You are all my guests, it’s not the other way around, that’s how I feel.”

— Lars Von Trier

18. “I like gardening. I’m really a nature man. I spend as much time as I can in nature. I feel really safe there.”

— Lars Von Trier

19. “If people do not laugh it’s not comedy.”

— Lars Von Trier

20. “Far be it from me to force anyone into either chess or dressage, but if you choose to do so yourself, in my opinion there is only one way: follow the rules.”

— Lars Von Trier

21. “It is more difficult to manipulate with film than, for instance, video. The problem with video is that it gives you a thousand possibilities.”

— Lars Von Trier

22. “I encouraged the cast to make up their own lines.”

— Lars Von Trier

23. “A film should be like a rock in the shoe.”

— Lars Von Trier

24. “I come from a family of communist nudists. I was allowed to do or not do what I liked. My parents were not interested in whether I went to school or got drunk on white wine.”

— Lars Von Trier

25. “I’m not a woman! Let’s make that very clear! Oh I don’t know, maybe I am. I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of me is.”

— Lars Von Trier

26. “Basically, I’m afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking.”

— Lars Von Trier

27. “I always do something that I’ve never done before.”

— Lars Von Trier

28. “When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour.”

— Lars Von Trier

29. “More than anything, there are more images in evil. Evil is based far more on the visual, whereas good has no good images at all.”

— Lars Von Trier

30. “I think it’s important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”

— Lars Von Trier

31. “I am not very tough with raising my children, but you can argue that to be more tough will help your children.”

— Lars Von Trier

32. “Unfortunately, on one or both of my shoulders sits lots of anxiety and that is a controlling factor in my life.”

— Lars Von Trier

33. “That’s the great thing about entering a convent: There are things that you simply can’t do, so you don’t have to worry about them.”

— Lars Von Trier

34. “I’m fighting against my will to control. I think that is what I am doing. I would like to accept things in life, in all matters of life I would like to accept, but it’s so difficult. I think we all have this struggle.”

— Lars Von Trier

35. “You know, I really do have some morals. I do actually care about people. And I do have a political standpoint.”

— Lars Von Trier

36. “Every word removed from the language is another brick removed from the wall of democracy.”

— Lars Von Trier

37. “You could say that when you introduce humour to your work, you also step back a little from it. You create a distance.”

— Lars Von Trier

38. “I did a lot of strange things. But I am a bad Catholic that’s for sure. Although I think it’s difficult to believe in evil.”

— Lars Von Trier

39. “There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug-addicts. Who the hell would bother with a Rolling Stones without booze or with a Jimi Hendrix without heroin?”

— Lars Von Trier

40. “When I show a film at a festival, I am showing myself. Everything is at stake for me.”

— Lars Von Trier

41. “I’m having a vacation, and it’s so beautiful, and maybe I’ll never get another film idea in my life.”

— Lars Von Trier

42. “The risk is that you furnish the project with new suggestions to try and freshen it up; it’s not always beneficial. You risk betraying the original intention with the story, forgetting what it is you really want to portray.”

— Lars Von Trier

43. “I had an almost fetishistic attraction to film technology.”

— Lars Von Trier

44. “I would say that I am a poor Christian; I’m not a believer. It was this idea very early in my life that life on Earth, nature or man could not be a creation of a merciful God.”

— Lars Von Trier

45. “It’s always been a lie that it’s difficult to make films.”

— Lars Von Trier

46. “I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them.”

— Lars Von Trier

47. “When I was younger, I was fascinated by David Bowie, for example. he had created an entire myth around himself. It was as important as his music.”

— Lars Von Trier

48. “If I made a musical in the beginning of my career, it would have been crane shots and tracking shots and people coming out of cakes and whatever, but these techniques are something that I’ve left behind me.”

— Lars Von Trier

49. “I hope my films will never completely be without the ability to mark anybody.”

— Lars Von Trier

50. “I know that I cannot be with a person for three hours without saying at least ten things that would kill me.”

— Lars Von Trier