A stranger’s take on a strange land

Times Staff Writer “My goal was to go back to basics and find the joy of believing in a story no matter what,” says Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier about his latest project, “Dogville.” “If someone tells you a story, you have to make an effort to believe in it. She sets out to help straighten things, but then “everything, of course, goes awry,” Von Trier says in his cordial, mellow phone manner. Two other German artists, the agit-lit team of composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht, are also partly responsible for the highly stylized look and feel of “Dogville.” Von Trier was inspired by musical numbers featured in Brecht’s 1930s plays, paradigm-shifting examples that paired Marxist ideology with cabaret-style decadence. For “Dogville,” shot entirely with a hand-held camera on a gigantic sound stage, Von Trier says he was obsessed with capturing the stylized miens and the slightly alienating experience of watching theater on television: “I can’t explain why. Horror author Stephen King loved Von Trier’s “Kingdom” miniseries so much he decided to write a remake himself for U.S. television.