Quotes

[press conference for Close (2022) at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival] After Girl (2018), I had to get back to the blank page before me and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had all sorts of proposals of course, but at the same time I had lots of doubts, much more insecurity than when making Girl. Girl was based on intuition - I just forged ahead without really knowing what a film can do. In this case I was much more aware of myself and how other people looked at me. It therefore took me quite some time to understand exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something with the same intensity, with the same passion as with Girl - that was important for me. I began to write down all sorts of different ideas. I was racked by doubts and I returned to my primary school one day in the village where my mother lives. I took a long walk, I visited the school and I don't know why, but after Girl I wanted to remember the child I was, because it's probably for the sake of that child that I make my films. I went on a walk with my mother and I said, "Mum, I really don't know what I should do now." She said to me, with great confidence and trust, "Well, I'm sure that you actually know what you should do now." And that was the beginning of Close; that was the beginning of a film which I think has remained very faithful to what I want to be as a director and as a person.

I am constantly in this process of going beyond myself by trying to go beyond my own limits as a director. So I am always attracted, fascinated even, by characters able to break the norms that they are internal or external, and for whom it is even urgent to do so as it is necessary for them to achieve something else.

[press conference for Coward (2026) at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival] The First World War is really part of our Belgian history; this war, this combat, took place on our soil. Almost every week when I drive with my partner, we go past the fields, the cemeteries, where you have so many young people who gave their lives for the war. And when I discovered a series of photos in black and white, amateur photos, I saw a group of Belgian men using ammunition boxes to create a podium, they were standing on them and they turned sandbags into skirts, ammunition into jewellery, and they were there acting and having fun. For me, that was the ultimate picture of resistance, it was an act of liberation. To see these men who were creating at that moment in time when they had to destroy everything. And of course I grew up with the First World War, when you go to school you learn about it, you go to Ypres to visit the trenches, but I had never seen those particular images and I realised that the memory has a kind of politics about it. There are certain images of the war that you are shown – you see these men who are violent and have to destroy things - and on the other hand, you have these pictures of creation, a time of grace, because the men are there for each other, it's a time of cooperation and I wondered why they hadn't been filmed as much. Whence the desire to make this film where it was a war where people were face to face, millions and millions of young men got killed. But when I looked at these photos and I read the newspapers, I saw how these men, despite the fact they were about to die, were still trying to find moments of pleasure, and also physically, and I found that very moving.