The cast of Vincent Bal's latest film, The Zig Zag Kid, knows about his taste in movies. 'At the end of the shoot I gave each of the actors a DVD of a film that had really touched me,' he explains. 'Among them were The Apartment, To Be Or Not To Be - I gave that to Isabella Rossellini - and Hôtel du Nord by Marcel Carné. These old films are from so long ago but you can see that they are about people. It's the story of the characters that touches you. They are so well-written, so well-made. Timeless, in a way.'
Text Ian Mundell | Portrait Bart Dewaele
Even though cinema has changed since these films were made, Bal thinks lessons can still be learned from them. 'The rhythm may be different but the emotions are the same,' he says. 'I think you can also get something from the tone. In Billy Wilder's films, for example, there's a combination of sarcasm and a sort of romance. It's like yin and yang. If it's only romance, it gets sappy, so you need a bit of the sarcasm to make it real and gritty. I really like that combination.'
Bal first came into contact with the films of Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch and other classic directors through watching TV when he was growing up in Ghent. He was also touched by more modern films. 'I'm a child of the eighties, so films like Back to the Future were really important, but I also discovered Woody Allen, and that was an eye-opener for me because I really loved the humour,' he says. 'Then, when I was 18, I discovered Peter Greenaway, which was a totally different kind of cinema and very visual. I loved Drowning By Numbers.'
Even so, this interest in cinema didn't add up to a vocation. 'A friend said he was going to film school, and I thought: sure, why not? But it's not like I dreamt of being a filmmaker when I was a child.' The turning point came when he failed his third year at the Sint Lukas film school in Brussels, and he had to decide whether or not to carry on. 'I decided that I really liked it and I really wanted to do it. That was a big decision for me.'
Re-sitting the year also turned out to be a good learning experience. He had already covered the theory, so he spent his time haunting the Film Museum in Brussels, revisiting directors such as Wilder and Lubitsch. 'From that point on I found my voice and my joy in making films,' he recalls. 'In film school I always got the feeling that I had to be serious, and that's just not my forte.'
His first short film after school was a film noir spoof called The Bloody Olive (1996). He followed this with two feature films for kids, Man of Steel (1999) and Minoes (2001). His influences are not easy to spot in these films, he says. 'There are a lot of references that only I know. It's more about atmosphere and tone rather than wanting to do a particular shot. I'm not such as technical film maker, I'm not struck by how the images are made but by the feeling they generate.'
'I'm a child of the eighties, so films like Back to the Future were really important, but I also discovered Woody Allen, and that was an eye-opener for me because I really loved the humour' – Vincent Bal
That was the appeal of David Grossman's novel 'The Zig Zag Kid', which he began working on in 2004. 'The images in the book are so strong,' he says. 'It's very romantic, very funny, and has an adventure story as well, with a lot of layers. But there is pain and melancholy too.'
The story concerns a young boy, Nono, who is sent off to see his uncle for a pre-Bar Mitzvah lecture. Behind this boring journey there is a surprise organised by his father, but it misfires and Nono is drawn into an adventure that, in the film, stretches from the Netherlands, through Belgium to the south of France.
Bal thinks the film will appeal to all ages. 'You can follow the child's story, but you can follow the adults' story as well, so I think there is something in it for everybody.' It's not so easy to think of other films that have this dual appeal. 'I remember watching Amarcord by Fellini when I was a kid, and I really loved it,' Bal says. 'As a child I could totally relate to it, but it's not a children's film.'
After The Zig Zag Kid, Bal has a choice of other projects to pursue. There is Brabançonne, a musical set against Belgium's linguistic divide that he has been working on with Pierre de Clercq, the writer of Come As You Are. Then there is The Substitute, a dark romantic comedy based on a comic book by Lewis Trondheim, and Wiplala, a children's film based on a book by Annie MG Schmidt, the author behind Minoes.