You’re never bored when you’re with Lars von Trier. If the Danish director’s sly and provocative sense of humour, often at his own expense, doesn’t grab you, then there is always his collection of antique erotica to keep you amused. Halfway through our chat, in his office in an old army base turned film studio in the western suburbs of Copenhagen, he places a figurine of a maid spanking herself with a feather duster in front of me. “That’s a little optim-istic, isn’t it?” he giggles. “It looks like something that is German-made but sold in England, right?” Well, maybe. But von Trier’s understanding, or lack of it, of foreign cultures has got him into trouble before. Having been criticised by the American media for making a film set in the USA, 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, without having been there, he arrived at Cannes in 2003 with another one, Dogville — and the series of Depression-era photos that ends it had US critics spitting blood. Which, you suspect, is exactly what von Trier intended. “Just tell me that I’m not allowed to do something, or that I can’t, and I’ll always do it. That’s just part of my nature,” he says, with a broad smile.

Set in the 1930s, Dogville follows the reaction of the inhabitants of a small town to the arrival in their midst of a beautiful stranger, played by Nicole Kidman. Clearly on the run from someone or something, she is welcomed at first, but becomes the town scapegoat before exacting a terrible revenge. Along with Dancer in the Dark, which saw a winsome, near-blind Björk being unjustly persecuted in rural America, it has led to von Trier being denounced as anti-American. It is a charge he denies.

“To be anti-American would be stupid. Why be anti anything? But a lot of the politics I am against. According to some right-wing people here, though, I’m anti-Danish as well,” he notes, in his precise and fluent English. Indeed, there is a school of thought that says Dogville is von Trier’s comment on the way Denmark has tightened its immigration policy.

The reaction to the film is further evidence of his remarkable journey from art-house obscurity to international film celebrity. Unlike Dancer in the Dark, Dogville did not pick up the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it is the superior film, and a cast that includes, besides Kidman, James Caan, Lauren Bacall, Paul Bettany and John Hurt is a very real demonstration of von Trier’s current pulling power as a film-maker.

His rise was prompted by two works of genius: 1996’s Breaking the Waves and The Kingdom, a surreal and sprawling 1994 Danish television series set in a hospital (it is currently being reimagined for the US market by Stephen King). In between them, he co-founded the Dogme movement, which rejected all that was artificial about movie-making, such as lights, props and soundtracks, in favour of a raw naturalism.

Typically, despite writing the 10-point Dogme manifesto in 1995 with his fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, von Trier never really followed his own rules. His 1998 film The Idiots, in which a bunch of middle-class malcontents amuse themselves and outrage society by pretending to be mentally handicapped, is the only one he has made that could strictly be described as a Dogme work.

Dogville, though, is hardly a conventional piece. Partly inspired by seeing on television the RSC’s ground-breaking production of Nicholas Nickleby, von Trier filmed it entirely inside a Swedish studio, with no sets. Instead, the town is marked out in chalk on the floor, and the actors mime the opening and closing of doors. The Brecht-like setup makes it initially a daunting film, but it is absorbing and generates some real power. And the closing montage of photographs, many by Dorothea Lange, who was hired by the American government in the 1930s to chronicle the effects of the Depression, is stunning.

Bleak and uncompromising, Dogville, claims von Trier, reflects the way he has come to terms with his decidedly icy view of humanity. “It was like coming out of the closet, realising that I was a pessimist. It was very funny, because, when I was at Cannes last year, I met the new governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said: ‘How are you?’ I said: ‘Well, I don’t feel so good, and I always fear that the worst things will happen.’ He said: ‘Oh, I’m the contrary. I always expect everything to go extremely well.’ But I’d rather be a pessimist in Denmark, making films, than an optimist and governor of California.”

Judging by the American reaction to Dogville, that’s just as well. Von Trier concedes that the ending might upset Americans. “That is the provocative part of it. But the actual action, what’s happening, you should compare to my other films — and they are as terrible as this.” The 47-year-old says this with relish.

A small man with short hair and a beard, he dresses like a 1970s art teacher in scruffy trousers and sweater, a blue bandanna tied round his neck. He is an unlikely despot, but his contemporaries at the Danish Film School in the early 1980s thought him enough of a dictator on set to add the “von” to his name. “I wouldn’t use it if it wasn’t fake. That would be in bad taste,” he says, grinning.

His arguments with his actresses are notorious. He and Björk were not speaking by the end of Dancer in the Dark, and on Dogville, he and Kidman would go into nearby woods to scream at each other.

“Yes, but that was not very dramatic compared to the film I made before,” shrugs von Trier. “So I would say our working together was ideal. These tensions are part of the game, and it’s not serious.

It is because everybody is egocentric. It’s a weird craft. If we were still in the stone age, all these people who work in film would be dead. They wouldn’t be able to survive: they’d be hysterical and nervous, and no good.”

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