Antichrist

Director's Statement

Two years ago, I suffered from depression. It was a new experience for me. Everything, no matter what, seemed unimportant, trivial. I couldn’t work. Six months later, just as an exercise, I wrote a script. It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if I would ever make another film. The script was finished and filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity. The work on the script did not follow my usual modus operandi. Scenes were added for no reason. Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking. They often came from dreams I was having at the time, or dreams I’d had earlier in my life. Once again, the subject was ”Nature,” but in a different and more direct way than before. In a more personal way. The film does not contain any specifc moral code and only has what some might call ‘the bare necessities’ in the way of a plot. I read Strindberg when I was young. I read with enthusiasm the things he wrote before he went to Paris to become an alchemist and during his stay there ... the period later called his “inferno crisis” – was “Antichrist” my Inferno Crisis? My affnity with Strindberg? In any case, I can offer no excuse for ”Antichrist”. Other than my absolute belief in the film - the most important film of my entire career!