POWERFUL CONNECTION
Paris, September 2022
For Belgian director LUKAS DHONT, making films has become a way to talk about subjects that he was afraid of speaking about as a young teen. Growing up in the Flemish countryside, Dhont felt the pressure to fit in within the established norms of what constituted ‘masculine’ behaviour - repressing his gay identity as much as possible and pushing away any connections he had with his male peers in order to maintain the ‘safe’ image that would allow him to stay away from the scrutiny of others. The director’s experience has become an inspiration for his brilliant sophomore feature, Close - a film which received a Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and became Belgium’s official candidate for the International Feature Oscar race. The movie, starring two newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele in the leading roles, portrays a heartbreaking story of a tender friendship between young teenage boys, which comes to a painful end after hurtful comments made by their classmates. For us, Lukas talks about a research study that helped him conceptualize the movie, discovering his love for cinema in his adolescent years, and the importance of making works that create a strong bond with the audience.
Close is such a moving story and it has really resonated with me a lot as someone who grew up being gay. When did you first start thinking about this idea for a film?
For me, it all started with a very personal experience, and I’m thankful to hear you say that you connected with it! It’s definitely a part of the queer experience that once you get to a certain age, you start to understand that sensuality and intimacy shared between boys is in our society immediately looked at through the prism of sexuality, whereas that same sensuality in female friendships is much more accepted and represented. And it’s an exotic thing when it comes to male connection! So, at a young age, understanding my queerness, I started to fear intimacy and I started to push away the connections that I had with boys, whether they were of a sexual nature or not. And without wanting to be overly dramatic, that's something that I still carry the scars from.
Was there a particular moment that sparked the concept for the film?
Yes, it was when I came upon a book by the American psychologist Niobe Way called Deep Secrets. She did research with 150 boys and followed them between the ages of 13 to 18. When she asked them about their friendships in the beginning when they were 13, they would talk about their friends like they are the most important people in the world and the word ‘love’ would be used by them often – it wasn’t at all like the Lord of the Flies narrative that we’ve gotten used to of that when boys are with each other, they will compete. Then, after asking them the same questions about their friendships in the following years, she came to a conclusion that there are these general shifts where the boys would distance themselves from the emotional vocabulary – the word ‘love’ is not used in relation to another man and the behaviour becomes much more performative. She shows how adolescence is this period in which we teach boys to be more independent and more performative when it comes to their intimacy or their connections. Reading that research made me understand that my own experience is much more about our ideas, norms, concepts and vocabulary that we’ve linked to masculinity than it is about sexuality. That’s when I realized that it was something that I wanted to talk about, because it was bigger than the personal.
The young actors playing the leading roles, Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele, are both debuting on screen with your film. How did you !nd them and what were the qualities that you were looking for in them during the process of casting?
It’s all about the chemistry – finding something that’s in the air that’s not always expressible, but something that pulls you to someone. With both Close and my previous film Girl, the mechanisms that we talk about – the impacts of society, the norms, the roles – are incarnate. In both films, we talk about an interior process. And so, to be able to exteriorize something that is so deeply internal, you need to work with people who are able to translate with the body and the expression something that happens inside. When I’m looking for these young people who have never acted before, I’m searching for the ways in which they can express something that is happening to them through minimal movements and whether it is something that we can capture on camera. Also, I don’t like for the castings to be just 20 minutes long per person – I like to spend more time with the candidates and see them work with someone who’s not me. With Close, the boys came in and worked with a friend of mine who’s a theatre director and child psychologist. We worked with them during a full day, and that permitted me to see how they interact with each other. I think you can tell a lot about someone when seeing them interact in a group. What was really special is that on that day when Eden and Gustav were first together, it was like different sides of magnets gravitating towards each other - one of them was very outspoken and the other one very mysterious. There was immediate chemistry between them and a feeling of collaboration. Then, I let them read the script because it was important for me that they knew exactly what was going on in the !lm and what they would represent. We talked about it very intelligently and they spoke about their own conflicts with masculinity and friendships. And after that, I knew that they were the right choice.
The field of flowers appears several times throughout the film. What does that scenery symbolise to you?
When you are writing a film, there are two realms to it, the conscious and the unconscious. For me, the unconscious part captured that image of flowers from my childhood in the Flemish countryside. That’s an image that stayed with me since then and it’s something that popped up in moments when I was just starting to put the pieces of the puzzle together. And then, when the theme of childhood – and the connected with it theme of friendship – came up in my process, that field of flowers appeared in my imagination. I was thinking constantly about this image of two boys running in between flowers, and to me, that moment had a feeling of a coloring book. And so, it was an ideal image to start the film with because it’s a work that talks about the period of transition from childhood to adolescence. Then, the other two words from the puzzle that were important to me were ‘fragility’ and ‘brutality’ – how the arrival of brutality tries to erase the fragility. Showing the flowers and showing them getting chopped up when the [farming] machines arrive felt like a beautiful way to use the scenery to visualize the themes and narratives that I wanted to talk about in the movie. Also, from a technical point of view, displaying the changes in the field was a great way to poetically portray the passage of time within the story.
I want to look back a little at your adolescent years - when did you first realize - that directing was something that you would like to pursue?
It’s a complex question and the answer is a puzzle of several elements. As a child, I wanted to be a dancer – I would dance to all the pop divas in my room. At one point, I tried to do those spectacles publicly during a camping week that we went to with our class. On the last day, we could all perform in front of each other – most boys chose to do magic tricks, but I wanted to do a dance. And I remember that after doing that dance, I felt this enormous awkwardness that existed afterwards in the room because I wasn’t acting the way that boys were expected to at that moment in time. I was very effeminate in my movements and just very much not like the others. From that moment, I felt that dancing was something that needed to be hidden and I would only do it privately in my bedroom, where no one could see me, with my Discman. I started to repress my desire for dancing and also started to observe how the other boys were acting – how they were walking, talking, holding their hands in their pockets – and I started to mimic all of the things that they did. And I think in that moment I became a director because I started to constantly observe and listen, which to me, are the two qualities that you need to be good at this job. Then, the cinema entered my life because of my mother. While she was starting to divorce my father, she went to see Titanic in the cinema. She needed this big love story and she found it in that !lm, she escaped in that theatre. To say radically, the cinema saved her. And so, I saw the possibility that this medium has for escape and for making an impact on someone, and I started to escape in films. I also wanted to have an impact on her that was similar to the one Titanic had - I demanded a camera, the way a child can demand something, and I started to film her non-stop. And she would go crazy because while she would be in the kitchen making lasagna, I would ask her to hold the lasagna dramatically, I would constantly direct her. My mother was my first actress.
If Titanic was the film that changed your mother’s life, what would you say was the one that changed yours?
It was Brokeback Mountain. I was in a theatre watching it as a teenager who was performing, I had become this actor in my own life, not being able to talk about my desires, although constantly desiring. Seeing a [closeted] gay cowboy on screen felt like seeing myself. I felt this connection, and I also felt bad because that’s how far repressed my feelings were – I wanted to simultaneously deny them and accept them. I had a very physical reaction to that film, sitting in a room with people who I could never express my truthfulness to, and feeling incredibly connected to the characters that I saw on the screen which would always stay fictional. So I think that this film has changed me because when I became a filmmaker and understood my strengths as well as my weaknesses, I realized that I want to make films which touch on subjects that I wasn’t able to talk about before because it’s important to see and connect to characters you see on screen. It’s important to be entertained by cinema, but it’s also important to see yourself and connect to someone that gives you an impression that you’re not alone.
Lukas is wearing all clothes Gucci
Interview by Martin Onufrowicz
Photography by Mees Peijnenburg
Fashion by Jonathan Huguet
Hair by Thibaud Salducci
Make-Up by Miwoo Kim
Photographer’s assistant Luca Werner
Post-production by Danny Griffioen