Belgian director Felix van Groeningen won a special mention at Cannes for The Misfortunates (2009), was Oscar‐nominated for The Broken Circle Breakdown (2014), which won a Lux Prize, and was nominated for a KVIFF audience award, and won best director at Sundance for Belgica, a music-driven drama with a punk-rock ethos, loosely based his dad’s café-turned-nightclub in Ghent. He’s developing an adaptation of Beautiful Boy, based on a father’s story about his son’s drug addiction, for New Regency and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. He’s back at KVIFF to deliver a masterclass within the intensive filmmaking program Future Frames.
How old were you when your father ran The Charlatan club? And were your parents also artists, or musicians – bohemian types?
Yeah, they were (laughs) – but not like in the movie. The café became the Charlatan when I was 12, and then my dad sold it when I was 23, to two brothers who had to start over, and the movie is like a strange mix of their story and the period when my father had that bar. So it’s not like my father is one of the brothers in Belgica, but the atmosphere between the people – the bohemian ideal, I guess, of ‘Fuck the world. We’ll do it by ourselves and make our own rules, and we’re different and we’re free’– yeah, I guess that was there. And the strange thing is that happened again when my father sold it to those two brothers.
They went through the same process?
Yeah... Whenever something becomes more serious – and especially in nightlife with alcohol and drugs – it’s just so hard not to cross the line and to lose yourself...
So was your dad a cool guy? Did that make it hard to have a classic teenage rebellion?
He was cool, yeah (laughs). Not in a superman sort of way or something. He was frail like me, I guess, and had a big belly – and he was bald (laughs). He also wore rings... So he was a strange man but just really nice. He did it because of his love of people and because he loved music and hanging out. But the thing The Charlatan became was not what he really wanted. He got swept away by the success.
You can read the whole interview in today's Festival Daily.
