“Lars von Trier—genius or fraud?” asks a May 2009Guardian Arts Diarypoll. Its subject is arguably world cinema’s most confrontational and polarizing figure, the results: 60.3 percent genius, 39.7 percent fraud. Trier takes risks no other filmmaker would conceive of, mounting projects that somehow transcend the grand follies they narrowly miss becoming, and willfully devastates audiences. Scandinavia’s foremost auteur since Ingmar Bergman, the Danish director has premiered all but one of his ten features at Cannes and reigns, asIndieWIREwould have it, “the unabashed prince of the European avant-garde” (qtd. in “Trier”). Challenging conventional limitations and imposing...

On September 19, 2006, two days beforeThe Boss of It All’s Copenhagen International Film Festival premiere, I interviewed Trier at Zentropa headquarters in Filmbyen, arriving with an impression gleaned from wandering the premises the weekend before. A twenty-minute train ride from the center of Copenhagen, Filmbyen lives up to its reputation as Hollywood’s antithesis: Taking up the last row of low-rise, yellow-brick buildings separated by large, pothole-marked parking lots, the former military barracks look like a cross between a Soviet concentration camp and a hippie commune. Housing Zentropa’s full-featured production company along with subsidiaries and collaborators, it has been...