Felix van Groeningen

Congratulations on being selected. How did you react? Actually my producer phoned the festival and we were told we hadn’t been selected. But then a few days later we were told we were. I don’t know what went wrong there, I didn’t dare ask. On the phone I stayed calm but when I hung up it dawned on me and I went “Oh my God, this is completely unbelievable.” And then we had to finish the sound editing and stuff in three weeks when normally it would take us months.

The film is based on the award-winning autobiographical novel of the same name by the much heralded Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst. Why did you choose this story? Before I started shooting Dagen zonder lief I was already looking around for a story for my third film, because the whole filmmaking process just takes so long. I knew Dimitri because I’d acted in a play he wrote. I had once suggested he write a screenplay based on an idea of mine. He’d said no, suggesting instead that I base a film on a short story he was working on, about an uncle of his who’d devised this drinking game based on the Tour de France. That didn’t appeal to me at all. Too absurd. Although I’d always loved his books so of course I read De helaasheid, not knowing that story had ended up in there. First I thought no, you can never make a film out of this. But everything comes together at the end of the book. When I finished it I thought yes, you can!

Was Verhulst involved in writing the screenplay? No, we spoke about it a few times. The story was too close to home, he didn’t want to be involved. He basically said: “Go ahead, do what you want with it.” A pity, but also fantastic. We wrote many versions and changed a lot from the original story.

Like what? There are beautiful and important chapters in the book where the main character says some outrageous stuff as an adult. It’s so well written that you understand and believe him, even though there has been a huge jump in time and you don’t really know this adult Dimitri. That didn’t work in the film, so we had to add a whole storyline in the present about how he is struggling to be a writer. Verhulst was troubled by this because it turned out to be a little too close for comfort.

Despite the different setting, are there similarities between this and your earlier work? Yes. I’m interested in portraying specific social environments. Dagen zonder lief was about my own. Steve + Sky was about small time crooks and prostitutes. Maybe I like it because I’ve never really been part of one. And the other thing is dealing with time. All films have a simple yet complex structure, in which the past and the present affect each other in a dreamy, associative way.

You’re famous for using natural-sounding spoken Flemish in your films. What dialect is this in? It’s Aalsters, near the actual village where Verhulst grew up. It’s kind of a funny dialect. We’d happened to cast an actor from the region as the father, then for the boy we went looking in the area and found this fantastic kid who’d never acted before. He had just the right rawness and matter-of-fact-ness. The father then recorded all the parts in his dialect so everybody could listen to it on their ipod and we’d sit around the kitchen table and rehearse, with him correcting everyone The actors loved it, it was a way to get deeper into the roles.

Is this a typically Flemish story? I don’t know. Sure, I’ve looked for locations with a nostalgic feel, but not because they felt ‘Flemish’. I think Dimitri’s great strength is that anyone can feel they know the world he portrays. He is so sweet about people and so hard at the same time that it just feels right.

Rebecca Wilson