Belgian director Lukas Dhont has achieved widespread acclaim for his first two films, Girl and Close, the latter of which earned him the Grand Prix prize at Cannes in 2022 and releases in New Zealand this week. He catches up with Canvas to discuss the inspiration behind the film and the way “small spaces” fuel his creativity.
I like to work in the smallest space imaginable. I really tend to be better and more creative in a small space rather than a big one - I feel more sheltered, more close to myself. I live in Ghent, my hometown. It’s where I was born, where I grew up; it’s my home now. I have this small space in my house that has a view on the park that is right in front of the house. I love to sit there and watch all these people pass by - runners, people walking their dog. I also see the park transform through the seasons. I see the impact of time on nature, on the humans as they pass through. It’s a very inspirational thing for me to witness that while I move through this creative space. In my space I hang up a lot of images that I collect. It could be paintings, photos. Recently I got very obsessed with a photographer called Sam Contis, so I put up a lot of his photos, black and white. And now I’m getting obsessed with the paintings of Henry Scott Tuke, so I print a lot of images of his paintings. And bit by bit, all these images start to become part of my unconscious. Then they start to mould into new images that become a part of the script.
Close is about an intimate friendship between two 13-year-old boys, Léo and Rémi, who have spent all their summers together, who have grown up in the same town, and who are incredibly important to each other. They have an intimate bond boys and men often get deprived of in this world because masculinity, and especially young male friendship, too often is represented as something performative, coded and distant. So it’s about this beautiful connection and a society that is unused to seeing it, and how that disrupts that bond between them. I had the desire to speak about guilt, the loss of innocence, and to make a piece about the transformation from childhood to puberty. There was this desire to talk about masculinity - both the stereotype and offering something new. The opening sequence starts in an abandoned military bunker, a place that is often linked to a specific type of man, or group of men. The vocabulary of soldiers, and enemies. Then the boys run out of that space into this field of flowers and other possibilities. It suggests how we may be able to shake this canonical vocabulary about men.
For me the film is a companion piece to Girl, my last film. They really speak about that moment in our lives where we want to be part of the many, rather than just ourselves. And so we betray parts of ourselves and betray people we love. The violence of conforming to a group, and not being able to express ourselves, is something I very much felt when I was young. I was a young boy who didn’t belong with the girls or the boys. I fell into this space that was in between everything. We love to represent youth as something happy. But it’s also a moment where we are confronted by the violence of a society that divides and limits for the first time.
We worked for a very long time with the actors. We cast the two boys a year before the film and we spent a lot of time on that because we wanted to find young actors with whom a collaboration was possible. With [young stars Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele] we found two amazingly creative, tender, ambitious young men. I wanted them to feel free to interpret and be creative. And so what we did was create this space in which they could create this intimacy and confidence to be present in the moment, to really make the characters their own.
