It might not be up for awards—what comedy is? But Belgian director Jaco van Dormael created one of the year’s funniest movies, The Brand New Testament, starring Belgian funnyman Benoît Poelvoorde, who is also a staple of French cinema.
French-speaking Van Dormael, 59, hails from Ixelles just outside Brussels. At birth, he had nearly been strangled by the umbilical cord and due to the shortage of oxygen it was feared that he might be mentally impaired. Mental and physical disabilities have become a recurring theme in his movies, which also draw on his early experience as a clown and children's entertainer. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Poelvoorde, whose manic comic genius is similar to that of Jim Carrey, is also bipolar.
In The Brand New Testament, a Franco-Belgian-Luxembourg production, which the Hollywood Reporter deems “religiously incorrect”, Poelvoorde plays God. Dishevelled in a dressing gown and sitting at a computer he determines the destiny of these human schmucks and revels in watching them suffer. When his daughter hacks into his computer she initiates “DeathLeaks”, which allows everyone on earth to know the dates of their death. The effect is wide-reaching as people suddenly follow their dreams. They have nothing left to lose.
Do you believe in God?
No.
Is that a part of the reason for all this?
Perhaps. I believe in doubts, I have friends who believe in God and they seem happy and I hope the Pope will love the film. I think he could.
He is not a bad one.
Yeah, I think he is clever. I didn’t want to make the film offensive to make any offence to anybody. It’s a comedy, it’s a tale, it’s a storyline about religion with some characters, but it’s not about the God that people believe in. It’s something else. (chuckles)
What’s this eccentricity in the Belgian mentality that your countrymen seem to embody in films like The Sexual Life of Belgians and Man Bites Dog (starring Poelvoorde). You are very eccentric!
Yeah, I think it’s a mixing of cultures. In Belgium we say if you live in Belgium, you have to be crazy otherwise you become nuts in this craziness. We are always mixing all these cultures and languages and things but it’s really fun to be there. It gives me a feeling of freedom. You can do anything; everything co-exists with everything.
Why have you taken so long to come up with another successful film after 1991’s Toto the Hero and 1996’s The Eighth Day (for which Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne, who has Down Syndrome, won the best actor award in Cannes)? Your 2009 English-language fantasy, Mr. Nobody starring Jared Leto didn’t do so well even if it’s now considered a cult item.
I didn’t stop working. Since Mr. Nobody I made a theatre piece called Kiss & Cry that was at the Sydney Festival in January 2015 [where critics declared it a stand-out]. It’s a one hour-20 minute-film but everything is made directly on the stage. You can see on the screen what you can see with your eyes and you can see with your eyes what the camera cannot see. It’s an ephemeral, minimalistic film where everything is on the table.
(Van Dormael and his choreographer wife Michèle Anne De Mey head the Charleroi Danses collective who created the production, which toured to more than 30 countries and was performed in eight languages. They have been working on their sequel, Cold Blood.)
Just after that I did The Brand New Testament, which took me two and a half years and I had five days’ holiday in that entire time. It’s a lot of work to write, to prepare, to shoot, to edit, to mix. Except if you don't edit it yourself. But if you are interested in all the aspects it’s a lot of work.
How did you come up with the story?
It’s the first time I wrote with a co-writer (Thomas Gunzig) and it was a great experience because we just tried to make each other laugh. We said “Ok, what if God exists and lives in Brussels? What if he has a wife and a daughter?” We spoke a lot about the son, JC, and then about the daughter. She is nearly a teenager, hates her father, and puts everybody’s date of death on the internet. So it just grew like that and became a sort of surreal comedy and at the same time it spoke about things that were touching and poetic, mixing comic storylines with stories about wounded people. All the six new Apostles are the sorts of people who think their lives are slipping through their fingers without them being really alive or loved by anyone. They believe love is not for them. Then the little miracle is that perhaps you can love someone in another way. Why don’t you try a gorilla? Why wouldn’t you go to a dubbing studio for porn films?
The reviews have said that 72 year-old Catherine Deneuve (who plays one of the new six Apostles) will do anything now. Is that true?
She is amazing. She is a strong woman, she is afraid of nothing and I love that. I saw her on TV when there was a march against “marriage pour tous” and she said it’s not the politicians’ business. Everybody can love who they want [Deneuve supports homosexual unions and adoption but just doesn’t see any need for marriage.] She’s such a symbol this woman so it was very powerful and I thought I would love to see her in bed with a gorilla and she is very funny. She’s a great actress.
And Benoît?
He is a very kind, sweet guy. He is so funny when he is the awful, cruel, bad guy. He can do it very well because he is totally different to that.
What was it like to work with him?
I try to work with friends.
I’ve known Ben for more than 20 years, but we’d never worked together. Most of the time we see each other after the sunset but never before. And I’ve known Yolande Moreau (God’s long suffering wife) since we were 20 when we worked together in the theatre but we’d never worked on a film.
We’ve seen end of the world movies many times yet the conceit of knowing your death date is original.
Yeah, it’s a simple idea. We all have friends who are told they have two years to live and we see a difference in them. We see that the idea of their death can suddenly make people feel alive and here they are all in fact, “Ok life may be short, I will do something with it.” The only precious thing is the hours that we have to live. That’s the little miracle God’s daughter is doing.
Have you had people die, has it come from something personal?
My brother died during the mixing of Mr. Nobody, of cancer. I saw that minutes were precious for him; every minute was a treasure.
(Jaco's beloved big brother, Pierre Van Dormael, who died aged 56 in 2008, had composed the music for Toto the Hero, The Eighth Day and Mr. Nobody.)
Editor's note: The Brand New Testament is now showing at the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, touring nationally in March.
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