FELIX VAN GROENINGEN

Felix Van Groeningen followed training in audiovisual arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent and graduated in 2000. He became famous because of his debut movie Steve + Sky casting among others former model Delfine Bafort (who has also been his lover) and Flemish actor Titus De Voogdt. For this movie he received the Plateau Award 2004 for Best Belgian Film. In 2007, he brought out Dagen Zonder Lief, with actors as An Miller. In 2008, he started directing The Misfortunates. The picture was selected in May 2009 for the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs from the International Film Festival of Cannes. There, the Misfortunates won the Prix Art et Essai. Subsequently Van Groeningen won also the Jo Röpcke Award 2009 at the Ghent Film Festival.
In 2012, Felix opened the Film Festival in his city of birth with his fourth movie The Broken Circle Breakdown, a country-movie starring Johan Heldenbergh and Veerle Baetens. It was nominated for the foreign film Oscar as the Belgian entry. It was a breakout hit in Belgium before it won the Panorama audience award at the Berlin Film Festival. This crowd-pleaser is a love story between a sexy tattoo shop owner (Belgian star Veerle Batens) and a freewheeling banjo player (Johan Heldenbergh) who starts a family and must confront their different ideologies when their daughter (Nell Cattrysse) gets sick. Here is a short interview about the movie:
The movie has this intense romance, but you plant seeds of the ideological conflict that is going to disturb this romance…
It was difficult. I worked very little on the screenplay for a year and a half; it was Johan who co-wrote the screenplay. Onstage, Johan ranted for like an hour and a half against George W. Bush, against America, and slowly… we understood why he was doing this, so it worked in a completely different way. In the movie, we realized it wasn't going to work. Film works differently, so we spent a lot of time making this guy likable where you would still understand why he became that way. It was a tricky part. Bush was still in office when the play was written. People were reading the script wondering 'is it still relevant?' But for me, and for Johan, the issue of stem cell research was the trigger to make the film. And he wanted to do something about it so I thought that it had to be part of the movie.
 

You challenge the audience to keep up as you cut back and forth in time.
I knew that we had to play with time in order to have an emotional impact. So we developed three story lines and then we went back and forth and we added to the screenplay and just felt it wasn't working the way I wanted it. At some point we just started over, said 'let's just forget about the script and retell this story in a different way.' What works on paper doesn't always work onscreen. What seems obvious on paper has a completely different impact onscreen.
Through the movie, are you saying that romantic happiness is impossible to sustain?
I guess that we have to enjoy it because that dark sickness may always come and will always come. But it doesn't mean that you can't enjoy your happiness. The weird thing I discovered while making this movie is that when you go through tough times, it's not necessarily bad. It makes you realize how precious life is, and that's what I really like about this portrait too, is that the happy times and the sad times are so close together that it becomes confusing, and seeing the happy times doesn't make it happy but as a viewer it's sad, too, because you know where it's going. In reality for me, when I came out of this theater play I felt relieved sometimes.

Source: Internet