taLent MatteRs
FelIx Van
THE FULL FELIX At film school students are taught that a movie is made three times. You write it, you shoot it, and you edit it. Felix van Groeningen never forgot this lesson. At every stage of filmmaking, the director will push things to the limits. He writes versions of the same story until he goes crazy himself. While shooting, he keeps on going until the whole crew is exhausted. And while editing he takes radical measures to get to the point where the film is the rollercoaster it was intended, but never foreseen to be.
Poster visual The Broken Circle Breakdown
FeLix Rising WHAT SETS FELIx VAN GROENINGEN’S HEART RACING IS THE MOMENT WHEN HE CAN MATCH AN ACTOR WITH A ROLE. ‘WHEN I SEE THOSE TWO THINGS COME TOGETHER, FOR ME IT’S LIKE THE FEELING OF FALLING IN LOVE,’ HE SAYS. CAPTURING THAT SENSE OF ExCITEMENT IN A PERFORMANCE IS WHAT HIS CINEMA IS ALL ABOUT. ‘AT THE MOMENT ITSELF, IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA, IT HAS TO TOUCH ME.’
‘Felix is the only director I know who never stops touching a film up. To begin with, he works flat out on his screenplays – if he feels he has to, he writes 20 versions. While he’s shooting the film, if need be he turns the screenplay inside out all over again, and in the cutting room there’s no one who dares to take such radical measures as Nico Leunen and him. These two nutters work like galley slaves and are not afraid to constantly question themselves’ – Dirk Impens (producer)
The director of such films as The Misfortunates and The Broken Circle Breakdown is happy to admit that he finds writing difficult and that visual style is not uppermost in his mind when conceiving a film. But his interest in working with actors goes back a long way. ‘I always wanted to be an actor, but I was never really comfortable when I did little theatre projects with other people, or casting calls for TV,’ he recalls, ‘so that didn’t really work out.’ Instead he started to make short films with a borrowed video camera, before going on to the KASK film school in Ghent. While this provided further technical grounding, his artistic development came from participating in the city’s Victoria theatre company where a lot of inspiring stuff was going on. Together with his friend Pol Heyvaert, he was invited to devise a show for the company. ‘Pol had the idea of having a performance with young people, where they would come out onto a catwalk and then tell a little story about themselves,’ van Groeningen says. After a successful theatre festival presentation, the show toured Europe for three years. ‘The piece constantly evolved, and it was there that I learned to love to work with people, to see what they bring and what you can do with it. My way of working was founded there.’
visual style
Cinema was less of an influence. One exception was seeing Kids, Larry Clark’s film about New York teenagers experimenting with sex and drugs. This changed van Groeningen’s ideas about the sort of stories he wanted to tell. ‘With this theatre play and a film like Kids, I just started looking around more. I tried to see what was
going on with people and what was going on with me, and to use these things to make films.’ His short films, mainly made with young, non-professional actors, focused on dialogue and character, so when it came to his feature debut he decided to emphasise the visual. ‘I felt that, as a director, I lacked a visual style,’ he recalls. And being a debut, he wanted to make his mark. ‘For my first film I wanted to do everything different. Everything!’ Steve + Sky (2004) tells the story of a romance between a petty criminal and a part-time prostitute who meet in the nightclubs that line the highways between Flemish cities. ‘That first movie began with three or four lines - it’s a love story involving these people - but I didn’t really have a clue why. You just start working on it and you give it a meaning. It went so quickly that I didn’t really have time to think about what I was doing,' he says of the film.
‘Felix is in-between an auteur and a filmmaker who sets out to please an audience. His authorship is there, but he’s very conscious of the audience. He’s also extremely open to suggestions, and that’s why we work well together’ – Nico Leunen (editor)
groups of people
‘His films cover very different subjects, but they all have his signature. And they are difficult subjects, but he also sees a lot of beauty in the grittier parts of life’ – Ruben Impens (DOP)
All stills from Steve+Sky
Realising that the story in Steve + Sky had a lighter weight, van Groeningen returned with a film that put visual style at the service of the narrative. ‘We still made definite choices about how it looked and how we filmed it, but those choices don’t pop out, they follow the story.’ With Friends Like These (2007) is about a group of young people struggling with changes in their relationships, with death and saying goodbye to childhood. ‘I thought it was beautiful to tell a story about friends who grow apart,’ van Groeningen says. ‘You know that it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it.’
‘One of Felix’s greatest strengths is that he can motivate people and get them all moving in the same direction. Partially because he’s so motivated himself. He is very well prepared, much more than some other directors. He works with the actors in advance of shooting and re-writes scenes then. He never shoots a script the way it is written; it’s like he’s always kneading the dough’ – Ruben Impens (DOP)
It also developed a recurring theme in his work. ‘I was always fascinated by groups of people, what the codes are between people,’ he explains. The same was true of The Misfortunates (2009), based on a book by Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst. Set in small town Flanders in the 1980s, it tells the story of Gunther, a 13-year-old boy growing up in a family of gamblers and drunks. Failing at school, he seems set to follow in the dissolute family tradition. But then he starts to think that escape may also be an option. The Misfortunates was van Groeningen’s break-out success, screening at Cannes, Toronto and other international festivals, as well as topping the box office for domestic films at home. This raised the stakes for what to do next. It also generated attention, so a lot of scripts came his way, but none really touched him. ‘It’s not my style. I can’t decide to make a movie like that. If I want to make something it has to start from inside.’
Stills on this page from With Friends Like These
classic look
That connection came when he saw a musical stage play ‘The Broken Circle Breakdown Featuring the Coverups of Alabama’. This tells the story of Elise and Didier, two completely different people who are right for one another. She runs a tattoo parlour and he plays banjo in
‘Making a film is never a picnic for Felix. It’s more like ploughing a field, and then ploughing it all over again, and again. Only to end up pulling up the potatoes with your bare hands. In other words, it never stops being hard labour’ – Nico Leunen (editor)
‘Felix becomes better and better at what he does. He masters the technique better, and he is also becoming older and more mature, so that he is becoming clearer and clearer about what he wants to tell’ – Dirk Impens (producer)
Stills on this page from The Misfortunates
a bluegrass band. They fall in love and have a daughter, Maybelle. But when the little girl falls victim to cancer, they lose one another again. ‘I was moved by it because it’s so beautiful,’ van Groeningen recalls. ‘It starts off so small and becomes so big. I had the same feeling with The Misfortunates, where the book just grabbed me at a certain point and touched me very, very deeply.’ In adapting the play he opted to give the film a ‘classic’ look, something the young director of Steve + Sky would have rebelled against. ‘Now that I’m a little more relaxed about making films I’m less scared of going for the cliché, and using those clichés and trying to make them my own,’ he says. The use of bright, simple images to create a larger than life feeling was not about appealing to a wider public. ‘I have the audience in my mind, but I cannot live with compromise,’ he says. ‘Everything has to fit, and making a decision just to make a film more audience friendly doesn’t do justice to the movie.’ In the end, The Broken Circle Breakdown quickly established itself as the most popular indigenous film of 2012.
solid team
‘Felix’s films are, in a way, fearless. He’s not afraid to take on the big emotions, to let the actors really get it off their chests. Some directors would say it’s bad acting; Felix isn’t afraid to let emotions run wild. But he still avoids pathos. It’s intense, but it’s also very real’
Stills on this page from The Broken Circle Breakdown
– Nico Leunen (editor)
While certain actors, such as Koen De Graeve and Johan Heldenbergh, recur in van Groeningen’s films, his need to feel a spark of excitement when casting generally drives him to seek out new faces. In contrast, his technical team has grown more solid with each film. ‘For The Misfortunates and The Broken Circle Breakdown it was almost exactly the same crew. I would work with the same people over and over, if I could.’ They include art director Kurt Rigolle, sound man Jan Deca, costume designer Ann Lauwerys, make-up artist Diana Dreesen, editor Nico Leunen, director of photography Ruben Impens and first assistant Sofie Tusschans. Producer Dirk Impens is also a long-time collaborator and has been instrumental in allowing van Groeningen to keep making films at a steady rhythm. ‘It seems so simple now, but for a lot of my contemporaries it’s not.’ Their relationship is very frank. ‘Dirk is there from before there is a word on paper until after the movie is gone and forgotten. He is there for every decision, if I want, and also if I don’t want!’ That doesn’t mean he interferes, but that he fights for the film. ‘He respects my creative freedom, but if he is not certain about something, he will say so.’ This is something van Groeningen values in his collaborators. ‘We are all very tough on each other, in the sense that we want to make the best film and we are not going to say we like something if we don’t like it.’ Some of these relationships are more complicit than others. ‘With Ruben, we need less and less words when we are on set,’ he says of his regular director of
‘Felix has changed a lot as a director. What has stayed the same is that he creates a great atmosphere on set. He demands 100% but he gives 100%. There’s a huge sense of commitment and artistic responsibility. You can feel him searching for things and you want to search with him. You want to jump into the same pool. He just drags you into it’ – Johan Heldenbergh (Steve + Sky, The Misfortunates, The Broken Circle Breakdown)
‘I usually write scripts on my own, but working with Felix was a very enriching experience because he opened up new perspectives. It was a very open kind of collaboration. It could go anywhere, and it went everywhere. It was instructive to see how far Felix could go in making an emotional chronology rather than a narrative chronology’ photography. ‘We have the same opinions about things, and when I don’t know what to do he is the first one I go to for help.’ Meanwhile editor Nico Leunen is expected to be more questioning, looking at the images with a fresh perspective. ‘I’ve learned over the years that very often it is with the first cut that you really see what a character’s arc is, what works and what doesn’t. The editor is very important in this process, and deciding which direction to move the character.’ For the future, van Groeningen has two projects under way. One is an adaptation, which he wants to keep under wraps, the other an original story about a bar, peeking directly into city nightlife. ‘It’s a fascinating environment, because it’s like a metaphor for a town or a country,’ he explains. ‘Of course there are a lot of movies about that, but not really about the inside and how it works.’
push to the limits
At film school students are taught that a movie is made three times. You write it, you shoot it, and you edit it. Van Groeningen never forgot this lesson. And at every stage of filmmaking, he will push to the limits. He writes versions of the same until he goes crazy himself, while shooting, he keeps on going until the whole crew is exhausted, and while editing he takes radical measures to get to the point where the film is the rollercoaster it was intended but never foreseen to be.
‘Felix has an image in his mind and he persuades you to do it. He knows what he needs and he pushes you. Sometimes you hate him for that, but that’s good’ – Veerle Baetens (The Broken Circle Breakdown)
– Carl Joos (co-scriptwriter on The Broken Circle Breakdown)
the FeLix CoLLeCtion
BonJouR MaMan
On a hot summer night, Saïd makes an intimate video letter. The death of an adolescent who looks you straight in the eyes. One camera, one shot and one beautiful human being.
WitH fRiends like tHese
(Dagen zonder lief) When Black Kelly gets back from New York, she discovers that more has changed than just her hair colour while she’s been away. Reunited with the old gang, she realises that life went on during her absence. Dir: Felix van Groeningen; Prod: Dirk Impens (Menuet); Scr: Felix van Groeningen, Arne Sierens; Cast: Wine Dierickx, Jeroen Perceval, Pieter Genard, An Miller, Koen De Graeve; DOP: Ruben Impens; Ed: Nico Leunen; Mus: Jef Neve; Running time: 100’; Year of production: 2007; Sales: Menuet
Dir: Felix van Groeningen, Pol Heyvaert; Prod: Kung Fu; Cast: Kader Bouchta; DOP/Ed: Felix van Groeningen, Pol Heyvaert; Running time: 9’; Year of production: 2001
steVe + sky
Sky is a strikingly good-looking hooker. Steve is a small-time dope dealer who got caught by the police carrying the wrong dose. They meet each other in their friend Jean-Claude's night club. Steve and Sky get together. But not completely, or then a little too much. Steve rejects love because he's afraid of losing himself. Or so he thinks. Sky is in love and cannot stand to be without Steve. Or so she thinks... Beats of Love... beats everything. Dir/Scr: Felix van Groeningen; Prod: Dirk Impens (Menuet); Cast: Titus De Voogdt, Delfine Bafort, Johan Heldenbergh, Romy Bollion; DOP: Ruben Impens; Ed: Nico Leunen; Mus: Soulwax; Running time: 100’; Year of production: 2004; Sales: Lifesize Entertainment & Releasing
About the things that matter in life: girls, boys, motorbikes, relationships, sex – you know how it is… Dir/Scr: Felix van Groeningen; Prod: KASK (graduation film); Cast: Sam Louwyck, Lies Pauwels, Trixie Withley, Sylvie Buytaert; DOP: Ruben Impens; Ed: Dieter Diependaele; Running time: 41’; Year of production: 2000
tHe BRoken ciRcle BReakdoWn
Elise is 28 and owns her own tattoo parlour. 36-year-old Didier is a Flemish cowboy who plays the banjo in a band. Although in many respects they are as alike as day and night, somehow their characters match perfectly and the arrival of their baby, Maybelle, makes their happiness complete. Life is good until one day, fate intervenes, and they lose their daughter. Dir: Felix van Groeningen; Prod: Dirk Impens (Menuet); Scr: Felix van Groeningen, Carl Joos; Cast: Veerle Baetens, Johan Heldenbergh, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg, Nils de Caster, Robbie Cleiren, Bert Huysentruyt, Jan Bijvoet; DOP: Ruben Impens; Ed: Nico Leunen; Mus: The Broken Circle Breakdown Band o.l.v. Bjorn Eriksson; Running time: 100'; Year of production: 2012; Sales: The Match Factory
tHe MisfoRtunates
(De helaasheid der dingen) Gunther Strobbe, 13, lives with his father and three uncles at his grandmother’s. After a series of failed marriages, the Strobbes moved back in with their aged mother. The all-male family lives in the filthiest shack in town by the principle: 'God created the day and we party our way through it.' Gunther daily faces enormous quantities of alcohol, picking up women and shameless hanging out and doing nothing. Everything points to Gunther suffering the same fate. Or will he yet manage to escape his misfortune? Dir: Felix van Groeningen; Prod: Dirk Impens (Menuet); Scr: Felix van Groeningen, Christophe Dirickx, based on the novel of Dimitri Verhulst; Cast: Koen De Graeve, Johan Heldenbergh, Wouter Hendrickx, Bert Haelvoet, Valentijn Dhaenens, Kenneth Vanbaeden, Gilda De Bal; DOP: Ruben Impens; Ed: Nico Leunen; Mus: Jef Neve; Running time: 100'; Year of production: 2009; Sales: MK2
Book: van Groeningen (F), Stockman (E), Gardner (D). FLX. Ludion Publishers, 2009, 136pp (with interview in English). A number of quotes in this publication were reprinted in this special.
FeLix and the gang
with JEROEN PERCEVAL with RUBEN IMPENS, SOFIE TUSSCHANS and JOERI VERSPECHT (r)
at the PalM SPRInGS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAl with DIRK IMPenS
with RUBEN IMPENS
with RUBEN IMPENS
with JOHAN HELDENBERGH with KOen DeGRaeVe (l) and KENNETH VANBAEDEN (r)
with VEERLE BAETENS
Interview Ian Mundell cover portrait Thomas Vanhaute With thanks to journalists Lisa Bradshaw & Eric Stockman, set photographers Fred Debrock & Thomas Dhanens and Oona ‘Menuet’ Demaret.