The directors discuss the casting and plot of The Unknown Girl…
At the 54th New York Film Festival, the latest film by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne was screened as part of the main slate. The film is titled La fille inconnue in French, translating to The Unknown Girl. Following the October 13 screening, the brothers sat to answer questions about casting Adèle Haenel in the leading role and developing the plot of the film. Below are the highlights of that discussion.
The brothers’ answers have been translated from French.
First of all, because she’s lovely in this film, I thought we could talk about Adèle Haenel. Can you tell us a little bit about casting her?
The Dardenne Brothers: When we are going to work with an actress, we have to meet them in the flesh, but it’s not because she was Adèle that we decided to work with her. We met her by chance at an Author’s Society evening in Paris where they were giving out awards. Adèle was there to receive an award, as we were as well. And when we saw her get up on stage to receive her award and spoke to her a little bit afterwards – after we left my brother and I said to each other that maybe there would be a possibility of her playing the role in the film. She was younger than what we had originally envisioned. That’s how it started. It gave us a chance to sort of get the screenplay going again. We were seduced by the innocence and very moved by what her face conveyed and the candid and innocent look in her eyes. We thought that that quality about her would make it possible for the doctor that we envisioned to be able to allow the others that she encountered to actually want to speak. And as far as integrating the actors, we rehearsed for about five weeks before we shot the film, an extensive, intense rehearsal process where whether the actors were known or unknown they all worked together. It gives them a chance to become comfortable with each other and to integrate with each other before the shoot of the film.
Like many of your films, I think it’s a film that engages with big moral questions and very relevant social issues. I’m wondering if these are things that you have in mind when you start the film or do they emerge later on?
Dardenne Brothers: We started with the character of the doctor, that’s what interested us the most. When we were working on Kid with a Bike, we had imagined initially a doctor who would also adopt the child. And then we rethought and thought, well to have a doctor adopting a child is maybe too much of a caregiver, then doubling the caregiving quality, so the doctor became the hairdresser. And we imagined a doctor, rather than being in a position of saving lives, was in a position of maybe having lost a life, maybe having created death. That’s an interesting way to look at the problem, because a doctor should always open her door and never shut anybody out, and here we have somebody who has to struggle with that issue of responsibility and having done that. So we imagined a doctor where the person came and rang on her buzzer. She didn’t do it on the door of the person next door so she then has to carry the guilt and deal with the responsibility of having been, in a sense, responsible for the girl’s death. It was her door that was knocked on, nobody else’s. We imagined her as somebody who had two people inside of herself. She was carrying the girl inside herself and we imagined that with the guilt she was feeling, she was spreading it out and infecting other people with that guilt. In a society where people tend to not feel responsible for people dying or for poverty, this created a climate in which people then did have a sense of responsibility could emerge.
Photo credits: Film Society of Lincoln Center.
