Life’s work has the occasional odd job

It is unnerving to be in Nicole Kidman’s film festival world, even for just a minute or two. To be the focus of so many intent eyes during a walk from a press conference to a waiting car here, to have waves of people imploring “Nicole, Nicole, Nicole” as dozens and dozens of cameras click almost simultaneously, is strange to the point of being surreal.

Yet Nicole Kidman, whose world after all this is, is remarkably centered and thoughtful about it all. “Coming from Australia, where the philosophy is you don’t make a big to-do over things, I don’t like the hoopla,” she says a few minutes later. “But you put yourself on show, you put on a beautiful dress and walk up those stairs, because this is the way in which people are going to see a film I care about.”

The film of the moment, Lars von Trier’s reckless “Dogville,” in fact does need the kind of assistance Kidman’s Oscar-winning stature, as well as her luminous, beautifully nuanced performance, can offer. Intriguing and intentionally provocative, audacious and inevitably exasperating, this self-consciously theatrical production (still without an American distributor though interest in the film is reported) is so out-and-out unusual that when Kidman’s old friend Russell Crowe visited her on the remote Swedish location, “he looked around the set and said, ‘What the hell is this?’ ”

Crowe’s confusion is understandable. The story of a small 1930s Western town that first offers sanctuary to and then sadistically turns on a beautiful woman on the run, “Dogville” was completely filmed, all two hours and 58 minutes of it, by costumed actors on a bare sound stage devoid of sets and all but a few props. What the script says are houses are actually rectangles painted on the floor; instead of an actual dog there’s the painted word and barking on the soundtrack.

“When Lars was trying to sell the film,” Kidman, 35, remembers, “he made a test reel and people thought it was a joke.”

It was the opportunity to work with Cannes favorite Von Trier, whose “Dancer in the Dark” won the Palme d’Or here in 2000, that interested Kidman in the film. “He’s an unusual man, strange, neurotic, obsessive, extremely complicated as a human being,” she says, the kind of director, like Stanley Kubrick, whom she worked with on “Eyes Wide Shut,” that she inevitably feels protective about.

“There’s a rawness to him, he’s very exposed, he gets misunderstood and strangely preyed upon.”

Making a film with any director, Kidman says, “is a relationship you have. It can be exhausting, confrontational, it takes an enormous amount out of you, so much that afterward you have to go away and heal. But, hopefully, out of that comes something artistic. At least we’re reaching for it.”

Fruitful relationships

Kidman says that “when I go to work is when I’m most open. I hate those ‘the making of’ documentaries because I think those times on the set are the most sacred, the most private moments. You’re giving yourself openly to a director and saying, ‘Take this. I’m going to tell you things, expose things, my flaws, my virtues, for you to use. Let’s go with it.’ ”

For an actress who thrives on this kind of intimacy, the fact that Von Trier served as his own camera operator, shooting the entire film with a 40-pound high definition video rig strapped to his body, was a singular experience.

“Lars held that for six or seven hours, you could see him sweating, breathing hard,” Kidman remembers. “When you’re acting in a scene, he’s there with you, talking to you from behind the camera. It creates an intimacy, an easiness that allows you to try different things. You can see his hand telling you to calm down, or he would reach out and touch my hand with his. Nobody else does that, but it feels like that’s the way it should be.”

The longer Kidman works, the more she sees connections between the kinds of directors she gravitates toward. “They’re obsessive, all obsessives, that’s the thread I notice,” she says. “I see it, I’m drawn to it, I find it fascinating. And I respond well in that environment.”

These filmmakers, Kidman also understands, are likely to have their work booed in some quarters and at some festivals. “I embrace that; that’s something that needs to be encouraged,” she says. “Everyone gets scared to have a voice, to criticize, to be criticized. Once you say, ‘OK, something like this is going to get a reaction,’ there’s a risk associated with it.”

In addition to “Dogville,” Kidman has already completed work on “The Human Stain,” directed by Robert Benton; “Cold Mountain,” directed by Anthony Minghella; and “Birth,” the new film by “Sexy Beast’s” Jonathan Glazer, and she has a new version of “The Stepford Wives” next up. “People say, ‘My gosh, you’re working so much,’ but it’s where I get my joy. It gives me my sanity.

‘Beyond the here and now’

“And it’s working with people with challenging ideas, delving into things that are profound. Ultimately what you leave behind in the world is so, so, so small, a tiny speck at that. I don’t want to miss an opportunity to put work out that might live beyond the here and now.”

As to the breadth of the projects she chooses, Kidman says “I don’t even see it as challenging. It’s more just my artistic journey. I hate having limitations, people saying ‘it’s just not done’ or ‘your films are expected to make enormous amounts of money.’ Changing is what you want to do as an actor; my spirit would be broken if I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to lie on my deathbed thinking about what my life could have been. I want it to have been rich and unusual, with strong emotional attachments.”

More than once, Kidman returns to the phrase “the journey of my life” to talk about how she views where she is now. “I’ve given myself over to it,” she says. “I’m certainly not mapping it out, not looking for balance. There’s no one place where I live, no home except for my children, no relationship at the moment. Yes, there’s anxiety, but this is compelling and exciting and dangerous and I’m willing to exist like this now.

“That’s why ‘The Hours’ was such an important film for me, so deeply moving. Not just my speech at the train station about not finding peace by avoiding life, but what Meryl [Streep’s character Clarissa] says about happiness being the moment, right now. That is so beautiful.”