As far as supplements go, make sure you block out about a week of your life if you want to get through it all. Criterion has assembled a massive array of extras, most of which have been drawn from previous releases. We can start with the audio commentaries, of which there are five spread across the three films and all of which were recorded in 2005: The Element of Crime gets two, one from director Lars von Trier, film and sound editor Tomas Gislason, and cinematographer Tom Elling and one by film scholar Peter Schepelern, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and filmmaker and critic Stig Bjorkman; Epidemic gets one by von Trier and screenwriter/actor Niels Vørsel; and Europa gets two, one by von Trier and producer Peter Aalbwk Jensen and then a selected-scene commentary by von Trier and actors Jean-Marc Barr and Udo Kier.

Each of the discs is packed with additional supplements, most of which relate to that particular film, but others of which are more generally about von Trier and his work. On the Element of Crime disc we get Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier, an excellent 1997 documentary by Stig Björkman that runs 54 minutes. Conveniently broken up into 10 chapters, it is a fine overview of von Trier’s complex and already controversial career. It includes extensive interviews with von Trier and his filmmaking associates, as well as footage of 8mm and 16mm films he made as a child and his work as a film student. (One complaint: The documentary does not use screen titles to note who the interviewees are, so you have to figure out who they are from the context of their statements.) The documentary covers both von Trier’s early work on his “Europe Trilogy” in the 1980s and his later output in the 1990s (with special emphasis on Breaking the Waves), concentrating on his consistent themes and his renown as a controversial director. “Storyboarding The Element of Crime” is an 11-minute interview from 2005 with cinematographer Tom Elling about how he and von Trier storyboarded the film. A 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary from 1984 includes footage of the film in production and interviews with von Trier, actors Michael Elphick and MeMe Lai, and executive producer Per Hoist, among others. “Anecdotes From The Element of Crime” is a 20-minute featurette from 2005 that includes interviews with film scholar Peter Schepelern, film and sound editor Tomas Gislason, assistant director Ake Sandgren, executive producer Per Hoist, prop master Peter Grant, production manager Per Arman, gaffer Birger Larsen, and sound recordist Henrik Fleischer. Finally, the disc includes a trailer and two of the films von Trier made while he was studying at the National Film School of Denmark: the experimental Nocturne (1980) and Images of Liberation (1982), a drama about a German officer and his Danish mistress in the final days of World War II.

The Epidemic disc opens with “Portrait of Lars von Trier,” a 1991 interview he gave for Danish teleivison. The 17-minute featurette “Anecdotes From Epidemic” includes interviews with screenwriter and actor Niels Vorsel, cinematographer Kristoffer Nyholm, actors Udo Kier and Michael Simpson, film scholar Peter Schepelern, and film consultant Claes Kastholm Hansen. The 150-minute featurette “From Dreyer to Von Trier” consists of an interview with cinematographer Henning Bendtsen, who, as the title suggests, began he career working with Carl Theodor Dreyer and ended with several of von Trier’s films (his second-to-last film was Europa. The disc also includes a very short trailer.

The Europa disc starts with “The Making of Europa,” a 40-minute documentary produced in 1991 about the film’s production. Despite the rather shoddy video quality, the doc presents a fascinating journey from the elaborate process of storyboarding to the various stages of production, including behind-the-scenes footage on location and on the set and several interviews with von Trier. “Triers Element” is another 1991 documentary about the film’s production, although this one dedicates significantly more time to an interview with von Trier, and it also includes footage from the production of Dimension, a film von Trier started shooting in 1991 and plans to work on for three decades. “Anecdotes From Europa, a 20-minute documentary from 2005, is exactly what it sounds like: amusing anecdotes about the film’s production told by film historian Peter Schepelern, actor Jean-Marc Barr, producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, assistant director Tómas Gislason, co-writer Niels Vørsel, and prop master Peter Grant (the best involve Jensen illegally bringing guns into Poland for the shoot and bribing notoriously difficult actor Ernst-Hugo Järegård with Cuban cigars). Also from 2005 are a series of video interviews with cinematographer Henning Bendtsen, composer Joachim Holbek, costume designer Manon Rasmussen, film-school teacher Mogens Rukov, editor Tómas Gislason, producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, art director Peter Grant, actor Michael Simpson, production manager Per Arman, and actor Ole Ernst. There is also another 43-minute interview with von Trier recorded in 2005 in which he speaks extensively about the “Europe Trilogy.” Lastly, “The Emotional Music Script for Europa” is a 12-minute interview with composer Joachim Holbek.