Interview: The Dardenne brothers

THE LAST last time Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the news didn’t come as too much of a surprise for the Belgian filmmaking siblings. “A TV reporter on the red carpet knew we were getting it and blurted it out before the ceremony,” recalls Luc. “Of course, she could have lied to get the interview,” says Jean-Pierre. “But Luc believed her because she was so embarrassed.”

Journalistic faux pas aside, it shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention to world cinema that the Dardennes would walk off with any award at Cannes. Since winning the Palme d’Or for the first time in 1999 with their international breakthrough film, Rosetta, they’ve almost become the Meryl Streep of the festival: nominated for anything they do and, so far at least, never going away empty-handed – most recently for their 2005 film The Child.

The reason for this acclaim is not hard to discern. Purveyors of hard-hitting, deeply humane films, the former documentary makers have, over the past 17 years, created a body of work that explores that favoured arthouse preoccupation, the human condition, with genuine grace, tightly constructed plots and a feel for marginalised characters that goes deeper than agenda-laden didacticism.

Their mastery of the form has won them plenty of admirers beyond Cannes. Aki Kaurismäki, director the Oscar-nominated The Man Without a Past, reckons that of all the directors currently working, “the ones whose films everyone should see are the Dardenne brothers”.

And while promoting Black Swan in 2010, Darren Aronofsky told me that he changed his entire directing style for The Wrestler after seeing their work for the first time.

“What can one say about that?” says Jean-Pierre, looking slightly embarrassed. “I enjoyed The Wrestler, but not because Aronofsky said we influenced him. What we do have in common, though, are characters who are obsessed with one thing and that one thing drives them.”

That idea is certainly evident in their new film, The Kid with a Bike, which – in keeping with their past work – was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year. It’s the story of Cyril (played by newcomer Thomas Doret), a restless adolescent pinballing through the care system as he tries to track down the father (Dardenne regular Jérémie Rénier) who has abandoned him.

“He cannot accept that his father no longer wants him, and he draws us in with that obsession,” says Jean-Pierre who, at 60, is three years his brother’s senior. “Everything is based around finding his father, and then it tips into something else.” The “something else” comes in the form of local hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France), to whom Cyril literally attaches himself one day while trying to escape his care workers. She, in turn, forms a strong bond with the boy, offering him the kind of unconditional love and support that he seems to be craving.

The film, the brothers cheerfully admit, is fairytale-like in its simplicity, yet its structure also reflects the way the script came together. “In 2002, this guy in Tokyo told us a similar story about a boy being dumped in an orphanage by his father and never coming back, despite promising he would,” explains. “This idea stayed with us for eight years but we couldn’t make anything of it. Then we had this other fictional story about a female doctor on a housing estate that we couldn’t make work, so we thought we could put the two stories together and, instead of telling a story of abandonment, we could tell a story of this woman’s love and how it could help redeem the child. But we changed her to a hairdresser because a doctor – with all the healing connotations – was too obvious.”

That change is a key to why the Dardennes’ films work so well. They tend to avoid easy psychological backstories for their characters, preferring to keep things more ambiguous by defining them through their actions. “We’re not against psychology,” says Luc, “but if you provide an explanation, the characters become psychological cases. If we’d said that Samantha was sterile, or that she’d lost a child, the audience would say, ‘Ah, of course.’ But if you say nothing they can think what they want. You don’t know why she does what she does, she just does it, and she justifies her behaviour through the act of doing it.”

The same might be said of the Dardennes. Growing up as part of a middle-class Catholic family in Seraing, the industrial suburb of Liège in which most of their films are set, they’re the first to admit that they’ve never been part of the hardscrabble world to which their characters often belong. That doesn’t, however, make their films any less truthful. Nor does it mean they have to justify them by overanalysing their own motivations for focusing on such characters. “We could offer political reasons, like they represent today what society excludes,” shrugs Luc, “but I don’t think that’s sufficient to love filming them. You need something else. For us, they’re people we like in real life and so we love filming them.”

The pleasure they take in making films, however, can probably be traced back to the illicit thrill they found as kids sneaking out to see movies. “Our father forbade us to go to the cinema, so of course we went,” beams Luc. “He thought the devil was in it,” adds Jean-Pierre, “and we liked that.”

Having now shared this passion their entire lives, though, has either of them thought about doing a film on their own?

“Too late,” says Jean-Pierre. “That’s how we started out and that’s how we function.” “An important thing you have to take into account in life is habit,” says Luc. “It’s not very heroic to say that, but we’re used to it; it works for us.”

• The Kid with a Bike is in cinemas from tomorrow

THE DARDENNE MUST-SEES

ROSETTA (1999)

The story of a teenager (Émilie Dequenne, pictured) who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother – and her attempts to escape – won the Dardennes their first Palme d’Or.

LE FILS (2002)

A carpenter takes on a new apprentice – the boy who killed his son – for reasons which are never entirely clear, in a fascinating, unconventional portrayal of grief.

L’ENFANT (2005)

A poverty-stricken young couple sell their baby to a black market adoption ring – then, haunted by the decision, the father tries to buy the child back.