Five Things We Learned From Reading Lars von Trier’s GQ Interview

"I know that I cannot be with a person for three hours without saying at least ten things that would kill me," director Lars von Trier tells interviewer Chris Heath during his GQ profile piece that appears in the October issue. Of course, this is why journalists love getting the director on the record: As controversial and provocative as his movies (like "Dancer in the Dark," "Dogville" and the forthcoming "Melancholia") are, he's even more of a firebrand when he's just talking. Most notably of late, he got himself in trouble at the Cannes press conference for "Melancholia" where he jokingly suggested that he was a Nazi and that he "understand[s]" Hitler and can "sympathize with him a bit." But although von Trier makes a few trademark weird comments in the GQ piece, there's also some great moments in there that have nothing to do with controversy. Here are five of our favorites.

1. He's been on edge since he was a kid.

Heath mentions that at the age of six von Trier saw a program about disease and immediately ran "under a desk in his mother's bedroom to await the sicknesses to come." Then he started getting freaked out about nuclear war. "Each time I heard a plane, I ran and was hiding," the director says. And his parents weren't much help: When he asked them as a kid if he might die in his sleep, they said that, sure, it was always possible. No wonder young Lars entered an institution briefly when he was only 12.

2. He's really glad you haven't heard of his short film, "The Orchid Gardener."

When he was 21, von Trier made a 37-minute film in which he stars. Apparently it's not available anywhere, which makes him very, very happy. "I am in a Nazi uniform, I am a transvestite, I am killing a pigeon, it's misogynist as hell," he tells GQ. "It's a caricature of a Strindbergian character running around raping children. Every scene in the film is politically so uncorrect." That sound you hear is the internet trying like hell to dig up "The Orchid Gardener" right now.

3. He's not really up on Kirsten Dunst's work.

Before casting Dunst as the star of "Melancholia," which won her the Best Actress prize at Cannes, von Trier had only seen one of her films: "Spider-Man." (Dunst told GQ, "He's cast three people now from 'Spider-Man' -- Willem [Dafoe], Bryce [Dallas Howard], me. I'm like, 'Is "Spider-Man" the only movie you've ever watched?'") But it wasn't just that blockbuster that made him choose to cast her after his original choice, Penelope Cruz, had a scheduling conflict: Paul Thomas Anderson had told him long ago that she was a great actress. Once again proving, you should always listen to Paul Thomas Anderson.

4. He says he's never been sorry for anything he's done ... well, maybe one thing.

"You can't be sorry about something that's fundamentally you," von Trier tells GQ. "Maybe I'm a freak in that sense." But after Heath asks him if that's true -- that he's never done anything in his life that he's sorry for -- the director did think of something. "I'm sorry when I was a child I had a little bird that I fed, and I was so young I forgot it when I was on holiday, and then it was dead when I came home. That I was sorry for. That was terrible. But then again, I forgot."

5. His Nazi comments at Cannes had a lot to do with his complicated family history.

At the press conference, von Trier said, "For a long time I thought I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew. ... But then I found out I was actually a Nazi." As it turns out, his parents met because of the Nazis. "They were both evacuated to Stockholm during the Second World War," Heath writes in the profile, "his mother because she was no longer safe due to her work in the Danish Resistance, and his father because of his Jewish heritage." Even though his mother wasn't Jewish, identifying himself as a Jew meant a lot to von Trier as a child. But before his mother died of cancer, she told him that his father (who had been dead for 10 years) wasn't his birth father. That man, Fritz Hartmann, was married and had an affair with von Trier's mother, who worked for him. When von Trier went to meet Hartmann, they didn't hit it off, with Hartmann eventually telling von Trier "that if there was more to be communicated, it could be through his lawyer." Hartmann was German, although not a Nazi.

And that's the thing about von Trier: As Heath points out, the director's Cannes comments were his really awkward way of explaining his own coming to peace with his lineage. But the problem comes when von Trier lets his tendency for sensationalism outweigh his sincerity. After all, what are you going to do with a guy who admits in the same interview that he "wanted a swastika [tattoo] on my forehead"?

Lars Attacks! [GQ]