Lars Von Trier under treatment for drug, alcohol addiction

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Press Trust of India London
Last Updated : Nov 29 2014 | 3:05 PM IST
Controversial Danish director Lars Von Trier has revealed that he is undergoing treatment for alcohol and drug addiction.
The 'Dogville' director told Politiken that he is now clean and regularly attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
In his first major interview since a self-imposed vow of silence following his 2011 comments where he expressed empathy with Adolf Hitler, the 58-year-old director admitted that almost all his films were written under influence, reported the Guardian newspaper.
The director said he felt his drinking helped him enter a "parallel world" and feared that coming clean may deprive him of that creative freedom.
"I don't know if I can make any more films, and that worries me. There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug-addicts. Who the hell would bother with a Rolling Stones without booze or with a Jimi Hendrix without heroin?," he said.
Von Trier is known for his films like 'Dancer in the Dark', 'The Idiots', 'Dogville', 'Antichrist' and 'Melancholia'.
Over the past year, Von Trier released two-part sex odyssey 'Nymphomaniac', the script for which he said had been written sober and taken 18 months. He said the screenplay for Dogville, meanwhile, had been completed during a 12-day drug binge.

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First Published: Nov 29 2014 | 3:05 PM IST