Lars von Trier in Mougins, France.  A day after the festival’s board of directors declared him persona non grata, Mr. von Trier chalked up his remarks to, of all things, his perverse need to please.  “I got carried away,” he said in an interview on Friday at a luxury hotel in the town of Mougins, five miles north of Cannes. “I feel this obligation, which is completely stupid and very unprofessional, to kind of entertain the crowd a little bit.”  Mr. von Trier dismissed the suggestion that he was nervous before reporters or looking to sabotage what had been, by his standards, a warm reception. Instead he blamed his fumbling monologue on his newfound sobriety. “I had actually been drinking quite a lot, but now I’m sober,” he said. “I would suggest to everybody, don’t stop drinking. If I had been, I would be almost asleep at the press conference and would not have said those stupid things.”  For years now Mr. von Trier has proved himself a deft ringmaster of the media circus that descends on Cannes every May. The last time he was here, in 2009, with “Antichrist,” journalists at a news conference jeered, and one asked him to justify the film. He reacted by declaring himself “the greatest filmmaker in the world.”  But while Mr. von Trier’s antics can usually be counted on for good copy, things quickly went south on Wednesday when a journalist asked him about what he had described in a Danish magazine as his interest in “the Nazi aesthetic.” He replied with a wayward riff about Jews and Nazis that ended with the sound bite, “O.K., I’m a Nazi.”  Mr. von Trier has devised many provocations over the years, on screen and off, but in the interview he acknowledged a critical difference: “They are usually more intelligent than this.”  His media duties here have now turned into a show of contrition, but even while apologizing, Mr. von Trier has found it hard to avoid his reflexive sarcasm. In a roundtable interview with a group of international journalists on Thursday, he said: “I’m very proud of being persona non grata. I’ve never been that before in my life, and that suits me extremely well.” By Friday he had toned down the bravado. Visibly weary, he even sounded a little wistful.  “Maybe it would be good for me not to come to Cannes anymore,” he said, which would be notable, because Mr. von Trier’s career was made at the Cannes Film Festival, with almost all of his features showing here and four of those winning prizes. “Anything can be an inspiration, and even with a mess like this one, something good could come out of it.” In any case, he said, he is swearing off news conferences forever, adding that he has a tendency to misjudge the mood of the room.  Not unlike the titular planet in “Melancholia” looming ominously over Earth as doomsday approaches, the von Trier debacle has eclipsed the film itself — “I almost forgot I’ve made a film,” Mr. von Trier said — not to mention the other films here.  The Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, whose film “Drive” is also in the main competition, was asked at a news conference on Friday about Mr. von Trier’s ban. “It just shows that in Denmark we have a very small mentality, and we sometimes forget that there are other people around us,” he said.  Mr. Refn is not an impartial bystander, to be sure: His father, Anders, is a veteran editor who has worked on some of Mr. von Trier’s films, and Mr. Refn has alluded in the past to his contentious relationship with Mr. von Trier. (On a Danish television show Mr. Refn once read all the text messages that the two men had exchanged.) He added that Mr. von Trier’s remarks were “very unacceptable” and that he was repulsed by them.  Mr. von Trier, 55, said he was keen to steer the conversation back to “Melancholia,” although his answers drifted frequently into confessions about his mental state. “I’m in my midlife crisis,” he said, offering as evidence the tattoos on his right knuckles that spell a four-letter obscenity. “They’re inspired by “The Indian Runner,” he said, referring to the 1991 film that stars a heavily tattooed Viggo Mortensen.  Mr. von Trier gave up drinking after shooting “Melancholia” and has taken up what he called the “very bourgeois” pursuit of reading and is working his way through Proust. “For 30 years I didn’t read a book, but because I stopped drinking, the evenings get long,” he said.
Lars von Trier says his newfound sobriety led to his fumbling performance at a Cannes Film Festival news conference that resulted in his expulsion from the festival.