108: Dogville with Lucia Aniello

About this episode

Phil and Emily are joined by Emmy-winning Hacks creator Lucia Aniello for Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003). Nicole Kidman's fugitive Grace hides out in a Depression-era Rocky Mountain town staged entirely with chalk outlines on a bare soundstage, and the townsfolk's charity slowly curdles into something monstrous. Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall, Chloë Sevigny, Patricia Clarkson, and James Caan fill out von Trier's three-hour moral experiment, narrated with dry glee by John Hurt. The three dig into the chalk-outline staging as both radical theater and pure provocation, Kidman spending her post-Hours Oscar heat on the least commercial project imaginable, and where the film's brutal final turn…