Wit & Attitude Quote by Lars von Trier

There is something deliciously paranoid in von Trier’s confession: actors aren’t collaborators so much as a force of nature you’d be naive not to respect. “Only a fool does not fear actors” lands like a warning from a man who’s spent decades building elaborate aesthetic machines, only to watch the human element short-circuit them. He frames performers as unpredictable power brokers - they can derail the plan, steal the movie, expose the director’s control as theater. The fear isn’t personal; it’s structural.

The pivot is the tell: “you can’t beat them... join them.” That’s less folksy wisdom than strategic surrender. Von Trier, famous for rules (Dogme 95), provocations, and an almost sadistic reputation for testing limits, admits that domination is a losing game. Actors are the audience’s access point. They carry the risk, the charisma, the volatility. You can impose a style, but you can’t fully script what a face does when it’s thinking, lying, or breaking.

“As I’ve got older” adds an artist’s late-career recalibration. Youthful auteurism often treats actors as instruments; maturity recognizes them as co-authors of meaning. Coming from a director whose films regularly stage control and humiliation as themes, the line reads like meta-commentary: the set is another arena where power shifts, bargains, and fails. His interest in “that part of the work” is an admission that the real drama isn’t only in the script; it’s in negotiating with the one element that refuses to be purely directed.