Lars von Trier Was Planning a Third Film in His ‘Dogville’ Trilogy, Titled “George Washington“

After breaking a story that Lars Von Trier was working on a new film, I received a few emails asking what it was. The truth is that I knew, I’d have reported it!

Maybe it’s “George Washington”? I wouldn’t put my money on it, but just throwing it out there.

In case you didn’t know, in the late aughts, von Trier was supposed to complete a trilogy, which started with “Dogville” and “Manderlay.” Like those films, “George Washington” would have been shot in a barren soundstage, stylishly utilized to create a minimalist small-town setting.

Von Trier’s former DP, Anthony Dod Mantle has now confirmed the existence of “George Washington,” in an interview with The Film Stage. Oh, what could have been …

Manderlay, which is the sequel, is an incarnate stepping stone to what was going to become a… kind of culmination […] So we had, definitely, clear ideas about what “George Washington” could be about […] there were notes about “George Washington”. He’d had an idea of what he was going to do; I can’t remember it now. Clearly I’ve subconsciously repressed it.

The problem was that, around the time the trilogy capper was being brainstormed, Von Trier got cold feet due to his fear of flying. It came to the point where the filmmaker and his cinematographer were contemplating shooting the whole thing on soundstage built inside of a ship, just because Von Trier didn’t have a fear of sailing.

I said, “Well, why don’t we”––and I don’t think anybody’s ever heard this, and he probably can’t remember, knowing him now––but I said, “Why don’t we build the set in a boat, on a boat? On a massive, stable, safe container and shoot going across the Atlantic? And you come; you can sail. Shoot it as a set, like a studio––have a studio set exactly like we do on Dogville and Manderlay––and shoot it. So we create everything we want with the actors and do it in a compact space. It takes 17 days to get across the Atlantic. We never took much more than that to shoot the others.

In the fall of 2022, Von Trier announced that he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 66. It was shattering news. He’s one of the great filmmakers of the last 30 or so years, definitely one of the most influential. With that, he announced that he was “taking a break” from directing.

This past August, Von Trier sais that “with any luck I should still have a few decent movies left in me”. I then reported on 12.13.23 that the filmmaker was indeed working on a new film, and that he had recently finished a script.

Von Trier hasn’t directed a film since 2018’s “The House That Jack Built,” an unfairly maligned 3-hour dark comedy about the most despicable serial killer ever put on film. It was provocative, disgusting, fearless, trolling — Von Trier’s best traits. Here’s hoping he has at least one more statement left in him.