CraveOnline: This film and your other films all take place in your hometown of Seraing. What is the environment of the city? What is its economic situation?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: Seraing is a town that was born for steel mills and coal mines. The coal mines shut down in the ’60s, and the steel mills in the late ’80s and ’90s. The town that we grew up in was completely, basically annihilated by the economic crash. These coal mines and the mills. And the town we grew up in was a very alive town, full of people, full of shops. A very well-functioning train station, a transport system, everything. A very alive city. And when we came back to it, we found a city where downtown was dead, the train station essentially no longer existed, and there were problems with drugs and problems with homeless and problems with unemployment… terrible unemployment. So we felt that the town called us, in a way, to be witnesses of what happened.
Luc Dardenne: Three generations without jobs. In the same family.
That happens in America a lot too.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: When we found the city after everything it had gone through, it was such a shock to us. Because the town we had know was one where there was community and unity and people that were connected and living together. And we came back, and we saw all these solitary figures wandering. That were very alone. People were no longer connected to a group. They were isolated.
“When we found the city after everything it had gone through, it was such a shock to us.”
Your films are typically about economics, a lot of them are about children living in poverty. I wonder if you are a fan of Charles Dickens.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: We like Charles Dickens. We like him a lot. In the former films, it was more important. In this one, there are a lot of children in the film, but they are not the main characters. A child in a bad economic situation and their relationships with their parents is important to the last films. But we like Charles Dickens.
You used to make documentary films. Why did you move into fiction?
Luc Dardenne: Our documentaries had the particular characteristic that they were portraits of people, and their link to the past. There was a lot of direction and staging. We weren’t filming something happening live, and following it without knowing the conclusion. We were doing something that was already much more staged and structured. There was already a desire already to be shooting with actors. Shooting features. The desire was there, so at some point we took the plunge.
