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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. We're spending this hour discussing friendship. One of the nominees for an Academy Award this year is a gentle and devastating exploration of boyhood friendship, masculinity, and the desire to be accepted. The Belgian film is called Close and it's a nominee for best international feature.

The story centers on Léo, a 13-year-old boy in rural Belgium whose best friend is called Rémi. Rémi and Léo are inseparable. They ride their bikes together, they attend concert recitals as well as more intimate moments like falling asleep next to each other talking about their futures. When they attend a new school, their classmates start to notice their bond and begin asking and joking about whether they're a couple. Léo's response is to turn away from Rémi who is confused and hurt. Close won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2/22/2022. It's currently out in theaters. Director and co-writer Lukas Dhont joins me now. Lukas, welcome.

Lukas Dhont: Hi, everyone. So happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: Now, listeners, we're going to have most of this conversation spoiler-free, but I'll let when we get into territory that may reveal certain plot points. Lukas, the film opens with Léo and Rémi in a fort, and it's almost like a little bit of foreshadowing. We can't tell if they're really in danger from some outside enemy, but then it becomes clear they're just pretending, they're having fun. They go dashing through a field, they fall down in the grass. How do these first few moments set up the story?

Lukas Dhont: I think the beginning of the film captures really what I think the total film wants to talk about. The film starts in this bunker, which, of course, is a location that we so often have linked to men, to the brutality and the violence of men. These boys, they make up stories of soldiers, of invisible enemies. They use this vocabulary that they have been offered for the longest time.

Moments later, they run out of that space into these beautiful colored flower fields. It's that juxtaposition between, I guess, the brutality we have been filming so many times and the fragility of these flowers, the possibility of something different, of tenderness. I think this film really is about how we have created in this world this visual vocabulary around men which so often is about war and violence. I think this film really wants to challenge that. I feel like the beginning of the film is really capturing that contradiction between the images we were offered and the ones we were deprived of.

Alison Stewart: We meet these boys at this age of 13. As you were working on writing the script and directing it, when you think about it, their backstory, when did these boys become so close?

Lukas Dhont: I think they were always so close. I feel like they grew up together on this Flemish countryside, where the film is set. I grew up there as well. I feel like [inaudible 00:03:34] childhood friends. They are in that moment in time, I would say that Garden of Eden, when love doesn't have to have a name yet, when it can still run freely. I feel like their bond is one that so many young boys have with each other. It's one of enormous closeness and where these boys also share everything that's going on inside of them with each other that they also openly dare to use the word love when they describe each other. For me, it's a connection that has been there for the longest time.

Alison Stewart: If you had to use a few adjectives to describe each boy, Léo and Rémi, how would you describe Léo if, say, you were introducing him to someone?

Lukas Dhont: That's very interesting. How would I describe him? He has an enormous warmth to him, but I think he represents that fragile age when caution is thrown to the wind and when sometimes we [inaudible 00:04:47] many rather than to one. I would think of him as a performer or performative. I think he has an enormous standardness, but puts on an armor for a very long [inaudible 00:05:05] That's not adjectives. That's just language. I'm trying to--

Alison Stewart: That's okay. Language is fine. [laughs]

Lukas Dhont: I also think he is searching for many things, for who he is, for language. He's a searcher.

Alison Stewart: How about for Rémi?

Lukas Dhont: I always thought of Rémi as a mystery. I always thought of Rémi as an enormous fragility, someone for whom the brutality of this world offers itself too harshly, insecure, warm, tender, again, but an enormous self-doubter.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the film Close in theaters nationwide this weekend. I'm speaking with co-writer and director Lukas Dhont. It is a nominee for best international feature film for this year's Academy Awards. There's this moment, they're in the new school, and it just happens so casually that these kids start to ask them, they start to notice this friendship of theirs and how close they are, and they start asking, "Are you a couple? Are you together?" There's this moment of Léo just really says, "No, and stop asking." What does that moment say about the power of choice? Because that was Léo's choice. You wonder what-- He could have made another choice.

Lukas Dhont: Definitely, but when we're young, we so often make choices because we don't know yet what we want, and what we desire, and what we need most. We make choices because we come to understand so many things for the first time and we are vulnerable and we want to belong. I think that scene is crucial because what I think it points out is, it points out that it's not even asked in a mean way, it's asked to them because we are so unused to seeing male intimacy if not immediately sexualized. I think we are so unused to seeing it that our mind immediately is conditioned to look at it as something that can't be anything else but sexual.

I think that it's a crucial moment because for one of the boys, for Léo, like you say, this consciousness seeps into their relationship and all of a sudden he cannot look at it in any other way than the way our society has dictated us to look, and he's confused about it, and he doesn't know what he has to do with that different perspective on something that was always so pure. I think it's about that moment of consciousness and it only takes a question.

Alison Stewart: It's funny listening to you describe it. I think about often girls, they drape themselves all over each other. They're brushing each other's hair, they're playing with each other. To your point, no one goes directly to thinking about it being a sexual thing at all.

Lukas Dhont: No. Indeed. I think with masculinity, with young men, we start telling young men from early on that the only place for them to find intimacy is true sex. It's not [inaudible 00:08:52] other. I think women have done a much better job in being there intimately for one another. For men, it has become so difficult to hold one another, to tell another he loves him because we have constructed in this culture that is so much about dominance and about competivity and about independence, we have created this armor for men that separates them from the world, but also separates them from their own language of the heart. I think this film is very much about that rupture.

Alison Stewart: That's dangerous for us as a culture, what isolation can bring.

Lukas Dhont: It creates this epidemic of loneliness I think that a lot of adult men, there are, of course, exceptions, but that a lot of adult men are faced with. I feel like we are opening up that conversation around mental health. Yes, I think it's important to talk what happens when we do not validate, when we do not value enough the connection to our own primal desires.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the film Close. It's in theaters nationwide this weekend leading up to the Oscars. It is nominated for best international feature film. I'm speaking with its co-writer and director, Lukas Dhont. These kids, this cast of kids, especially in that first scene where it comes up, like, "Are you a couple?" they're just such kids. They're not perfect faces. They're a little bit awkward. They have that awkward feeling that people have around 13 and 14. How did you cast your film?

Lukas Dhont: The casting process of this film was of course, very important. We needed to find two 13-year old boys who were going to be at that precise moment in time between childhood and puberty, and also, who would probably have never acted before. I went to scout in a lot of schools in and around Brussels and saw many, many young talented people. Then something very particular happens.

I was taking a train from Antwerp to Ghent. I was listening to music and looking outside of the train window being all nostalgic. All of a sudden, I turn my head, and I see there's this young angel sitting in the coach next to me, talking to his friends very expressively. I thought, "Wow, this young person has an enormous expression, has a fire in his eyes." I also thought, "I'm going to regret if I don't go up to him and ask him if he wants to do a casting for cinema."

I had heard these stories of directors finding their actors on platforms of trains and I thought that's fiction. It's not because he became the protagonist of this film. From the very first moment he came to our castings, we realized that we were seeing the birth of a performer. Our casting process was great because I love working with young people. I love listening to young people, I think they say things in a very philosophical way, if we really, really listened to them. I think it was my favorite part of making this film.

Alison Stewart: What were the conditions for the two young actor so that they could really get to know each other so that this bond would be believable?

Lukas Dhont: We always casted in groups. We casted in groups of 20 boys, and in one of these groups, Eden and Gustav, by coincidence came together. I think from the very beginning, they really gravitated to each other. They had this chemistry that one can only explain as because it's me, because it's him. It's as simple as that. You have it with some people, and with others, you don't. Between them, we saw the possibility of collaboration.

Then we rehearsed over the course of six months. We really spent a lot of time with them. They got to know each other profoundly. We really put a lot of effort and work in building this family, building comfort, building confidence for them, to show these emotions. Over these course of months, I think they really got to that place. They felt they could do it. Before we arrived on set, they felt that they were ready for it, they felt that they could be free to add elements of themselves, but they also [inaudible 00:14:05] understood what the roles were about.

Alison Stewart: Was there any-- [crosstalk] No, please.

Lukas Dhont: No, I was going to say I have a very specific way of working. I did a film school that combined documentary and fiction. In my work with actors, I always try to to implement a little bit of the documentary approach. For example, after the first month of working, I will already [[inaudible 00:14:36] and have the camera film us as we are together, just all of us. They get so used to the camera that it becomes transparent, that the camera becomes so organic to them that they can show their emotions very openly to it.

Alison Stewart: The film explores some very complex emotions and difficult experiences. I'm curious how involved the young actors' parents were and what those conversations were like.

Lukas Dhont: The parents were very involved. They read the scripts during our casting process. I wanted them to know what the film was about. We had a very beautiful, open conversation about it. I think they were just really completely behind, it seems. They understood why there is this incredible importance to showing the tenderness in this young male universe, but also show the loss of it. I really felt like they were as excited as us as a film team to bring this to life.

They were the very first people also to see an edit of the film, together with their sons. I remember that moment so well because, of course, we had been working on it, but when they saw the film, they was so moved by it and and so moved by their sons. I felt like they completely understood why we did it the way we did.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the film Close with its co-writer and director, Lukas Dhont, is the nominee for Best International Feature Film. Once this topic of, "Are you a couple?" is brought up in this school, Léo really turns away from Rémi. He turns away from him as a friend, he turns away from him in the things that they do Rémi, Léo starts to become really interested in hockey, he joins the hockey team. What does hockey represent to Léo at this point?

Lukas Dhont: I think there was this image in the beginning of the script that we never filmed. It was this image of a flock of black birds in the sky, all flying in the same direction. The beauty but the horror of it also. It's an image that was really important for me because it's translates this idea that when we are young, so often we want to fly in the same direction as the others, we want to disappear in the group rather than we want to stand out.

We didn't film it, but when I was looking for a translation for that, I thought all these boys on the ice in their black hockey costume are a little bit this flock of birds. Léo so desperately wants to disappear in between them. He wants to become one of them. I think the very first thing that interested me with the hockey was actually the costume, was that costume, which is a little bit of an armor that this very fragile boy and this very fragile physique puts on for a big part of the film. He even literally has a mask on [unintelligible 00:18:04] that hides his face for us.

In the second part of the film that is so much about this feeling of guilt and responsibility, I feel like that armor shuts him off from the world. It's like nothing can enter and nothing can exit anymore. For me, it's a beautiful representation what happens when we feel guilty. Often it's something that we carry around with us, that many of us aren't able to exteriorize.

Alison Stewart: Before we continue our conversation, I want to give two warnings for our listeners. The first is we're going to discuss a major turning point in the film, happens about halfway through in case you don't want any spoilers. The second warning will explain the first. I want our listeners to know that part of this interview is going to deal with the topic of suicide. If now's not a good time for you to listen, you can always find this later on demand, on our podcast, on our app, or on our website.

If anytime you feel you need support while you're listening to this conversation or anytime, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 800-273-8255. Léo's pushed Rémi away. They aren't spending time together. One day Rémi does not show up for a field trip and we learn that Rémi has died by suicide. Was this always part of the story? Was this always the way you wanted to tell the part of the story which is about the devastation of loss and of not belonging and losing a love?

Lukas Dhont: I think what we come to learn in the first part of the film, of course, is that Rémi is his own character. He always stays a little bit an island for us as well. We feel that there is a fragility to him. There's a scene where we see his mother knocking on the bathroom door and he has locked it and doesn't want to open it. There is something to him that we cannot see. There's this door that becomes a little bit representative of something that shuts us off as well, even for Léo, something that is not [unintelligible 00:20:27]

I feel like we have focused so many times on the wars of the outside, on the wars done to others, and I feel like we need to destigmatize talking about the wars on the insides. I feel like we need to destigmatize talking about mental health and suicide, even if it is a very complex and difficult thing.

I think when we were doing the research around masculinity and about the rupture that we create with the language of the inside when we tell young boys not to listen to what they actually truly desire, which is authentic connection, we realized when doing the research and when reading, that it's also the moment in time where when we look at the statistics, the suicide rate for men goes up four times compared to that of women. I did feel like it's a necessity to address that. I do feel like we need to be able to speak of that.

Alison Stewart: There's a moment when the school bus returns and you can feel it-- It's really shot and created in a really dramatic way, but subtle, that there's something wrong. As the kids, this school bus pulls in, there's just this energy, there's sort of a home that's going among the students in the teachers and they realize their parents are all there. Léo's approached on the bus, and he doesn't leave the bus, he seems to know something's happened and he seems to understand something's happened. When you were working with the actor in that moment, what were some of the conversations around that moment?

Lukas Dhont The conversations were had-- The boys read the script at the very last stage of casting because I wanted this to be not only us choosing them, but also them choosing us. We had a very open conversation on its themes. They are incredibly emotionally intelligent. I think we often underestimate how intelligent kids are and how much they already know and experience about the world at a young age. Often I feel adults maybe underestimate being at eye level with kids when it comes to difficult themes because they are confronted with them.

Of course, the film and the script, I think it addresses violence but leaves the violence off screen, which is, of course, a very important element in working, I think, with young people. There's the things you address and the things you don't have to. When [inaudible 00:23:30] added during the preparation, during the six months, Eden and I had this very [inaudible 00:23:36] about loss. He is someone who has lost he knows that.

I think in understanding that he could speak of it with me. I think in a world that often avoids difficult topics with children, I think he felt there was this openness that he could use, and that he could dive into, and that he could explore and maybe now he could turn it into art.

All I think of art is that sometimes when we are confronted with more difficult moments with more difficult emotions, we can actually use our creativity to turn them to make them into something beautiful. I think he sensed that he was able to do that. I think he was very proud of the fact that he was.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the film Close. It is in theaters nationwide this weekend. It is an Oscar nominee for best international feature film. I'm speaking with its co-writer and director, Lukas Dhont. Lukas, you may remember that Bong Joon-ho once famously and hilarious we call the Oscars a very local award ceremony.

[laughter]

Lukas Dhont Oh my God. Yes, it is. He's absolutely right.

Alison Stewart: Tell me more, say more about that.

Lukas Dhont Well, it is very centered in this part of the world, in this very concrete setting, very linked to American film, American cinema. For me, I know I want to make films since I'm 12. I grew up with this very American, or English-speaking, cinema. As a kid, the Oscars were always a little bit at the core of my childhood dreams. I remember I was writing scripts already at that time. I already envisioned myself having 11 Oscar nominations with these little scripts I wrote when I was young. It's always incredibly powerful to get so close to-- an even if it's very, of course, linked to that American film, I guess, like Bong Joon-ho says, it's a very local even, for me, it represents something much bigger because for me it represents that first desire of making cinema.

Alison Stewart: Close is in theaters nationwide. This weekend. I've been speaking with his co-writer and director, Lukas Dhont. Lukas, thanks for spending so much time with us.

Lukas Dhont Thank you so much. Thank you for having that conversation with us. It's really important to me.

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