Breakfast with De Smet

An interview with Thomas Baerten, co-director of De Smet

 How did you write your story? Did you write it with Wim?

I wrote a first draft of the script by myself, and we were talking about who’s gonna direct it, so I contacted Wim Geudens because he had more experience in directing and I wasn’t too sure if I could handle a big project like this by myself.

 What inspired you to create these three copycat brothers?

Actually there is a small town in Flanders, and my sister lives there, and there are three sisters in that town and all three of them are single and they live together a bit like the guys in the movie, so if one goes shopping, she does the shopping for all the three. I heard about them and I thought it was kind of sad but also kind of brilliant that they made such a system, and one day I asked for a submission for the film and I submitted that idea.

 But it was three women, wasn’t it? Why did you change them into three men?

Well I think if a woman is alone, she can manage it, she can do everything, but if a man is alone he’s kind of desperate because most men can’t cook or clean, so if you have three brothers, someone has to clean, someone has to cook, and I think it’s more funny that way.

 The three brothers’ quiet routine is disrupted when a woman moves in across the street… Are they afraid of women? Of being separated?

I think they have given up women, except for the guy who falls in love, he has a little hope maybe, to find someday a wife, but the two others have just given up. They have been single all their life. And also the town dressed of the movie is all guys, even in a café, you won’t see any woman there, so if a woman comes, it’s like a big surprise for everybody.

 Their passion is to play cards. They are even card-playing champions. Is this a bit autobiographical?

Not really. In Flanders it’s really popular to play cards “ganache” it doesn’t really exist. I think if you put a tactical game, the audience couldn’t follow.

 Playing cards is popular, but the atmosphere is quite unusual here. There are fans, competitions with trophies and lots of drinking going on.

I play football in Belgium, and every year the club organizes a tournament for cards, and when it’s the final all the people gather around the table where the guys are playing the final. It’s actually weird that people are interested in some guys playing cards.

 The film has an extremely precise and symmetrical structure. Is this structure a reminder of what the characters are like?

The guys in the movie have such a well-built system for their lives. We tried to put it in every scene of the movie, the things that they do, that they say but it is also in the image. It’s almost too real to be true. Actually it’s also really styled images.

 Can you tell us more about visual composition?

Concerning the images, it’s a combination of Wes Anderson and Roy Anderson. Especially Wes Anderson who uses a lot of top shots, that are almost like painting, and each time everything is perfectly in place, so we found that it was the right style for the movie. And also the long text from Roy Anderson because their lives are kind of boring so we wanted to use long texts. And it’s difficult to be long and interesting because it had to seem boring but we had to give details in the picture so people would keep watching.

 The three brothers live in three detached houses right next to each other. Do these houses really exist? They look a bit surreal…

One does. We tried to look for three houses and we found some but the problem was the picture has to be really tight, so if you wanted to do that with normal lens, so not a fisheye you have to be like 50 meters back and that was actually the biggest problem, so in the end we just filmed one house and copy it two times in post-production.

 Do you have upcoming projects, short or feature?

We are going to write series for TV about De Smet, it’s gonna be six or seven episodes. Moreover, Wim is writing a treatment for two features and in the meantime I’m writing a short screenplay for one other film, so we’re busy (he laughs)