Lukas Dhont on the difficulties of teenage friendship: ‘I pushed people away, although I didn’t really want to’:

The dark corner of the internet styled as the “manosphere” – a virtual space where women are “foids” and Andrew Tate is a lifestyle choice – chatters with competing reasons why various misogynists have failed to conquer womankind in the way they might have hoped for. Lukas Dhont has an idea that seldom appears on those forums sociologist Michael Kimmel might characterise as “aggrieved entitlement”.

The Oscar-winning director of Girl suggests that young men need tenderness.

“When I grew up, I started to fear intimacy with other young men because I feel like we live in a society that so often depicts young men at war,” says Dhont. “Or so often depicts a sort of male performance of who we are when we are with each other. So I think, at a certain age, I started to push away people although I didn’t really want to,” he explains.

“And at that very crucial moment in time, when you don’t understand yet, how fragile our relationships are. My film is really drawn from that experience of pushing away and being pushed away at that very crucial moment in time. I think it’s something that we will all relate to, because we have all experienced powerful friendships, but we have also experienced the heartbreak linked to it.”

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Dhont’s extraordinarily powerful second feature is Close, a drama concerning the friendship between two 13-year-old boys. As the film opens, best friends Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) leave behind a carefree summer to return to school. The pair enjoy bike rides and sleepovers and dashing through the flower fields where Léo’s family work. One day, however, a girl classmate wonders aloud if the boys are gay. The question prompts Léo to push Rémi away, a rejection that ultimately has tragic consequences.

“There’s this sort of Garden of Eden feeling to the beginning because, for 15 minutes of this film, you get two boys together, experiencing a summer holiday, running through the fields,” says Dhont, who co-wrote the screenplay with Angelo Tijssens.

“I wanted to be transported back to that moment. I really thought that was important to show that connection because we don’t often get to see that tenderness between boys. I think that starts from a very political place because we have been filming men fighting with each other much more than we have been focusing on them finding a connection,” Dhont says.

“I believe that a strong feminist movement has deconstructed or shown how we still live in this patriarchy. I want to remind us of 13-year-old boys and how they speak. What they tell us is that they need authentic connection. As a society, we have lost that somehow. Everything that is hard and brutal smothers the things that are soft and tender.”

The script was like choreography. It’s not finished until it’s performed

Close, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, was partly based on the filmmaker’s own experiences. He was equally inspired by the work of psychologist Niobe Way, particularly her 2013 book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. The book is a longitudinal study of 150 young men, tracing a line between youngsters who describe their friendships in terms that sound more like Love Story than Lord of the Flies and the macho adolescents they become. Following on from his wildly successful debut feature, Girl, it was Way’s writing that codified Dhont’s idea for his “difficult second album”. The sexual identity of the two main characters in Close is irrelevant, says the writer-director; the grander point is that any intimacy between teenage boys is interpreted as gay. “No homo,” as Way notes, becomes the mantra of late adolescence.

“When we realised we wanted to make this film about masculinity, that was when I read the books of Niobe,” says the 31-year-old, “And once I read how these young boys aged 13 talked, ultimately about the love and how they feel for each other, it was very familiar. I also read that, at 18, so many of them completely distanced themselves from that language. I realised that what I had always felt was a very personal experience, something I thought, I was the only one feeling, was actually not at all that personal. I really connected with the young men speaking.”

Dhont’s script was also shaped by extensive workshopping with his cast. Eden Dambrine was an aspiring ballet dancer while Gustav De Waele was part of a youth theatre group when they were cast. Neither had acted in front of a camera before working on Close. Prior to the shoot, the boys spent time with the adult cast and the director, correcting dialogue into their own words and analysing their characters’ behaviours over the course of various social get-togethers. The shoot, too, relied on natural light and real locations.

It’s been really powerful spending that very important moment in their lives and watching the very strong, powerful connections they have with each other

“We had small workshops and we created exercises. We also really spent a lot of time looking at how they feel, how sure they are, and who they are in order to know whether we can work with them,” Dhont says.

“Eden and Gustav are two young people who are very eloquent and have also steady, stable home situations. They are also performers. We knew that they would be able to perform something. As much as you can go into the skin of a character, you have to also get out of it.

“I have an amazing child acting coach who is one of my great friends; a psychologist who teaches theatre classes to young people. He accompanied me and the boys from the very first casting to the very last day of shooting. We made sure that there was a platform to talk about everything and to talk about things we were scared of or things that don’t feel. Or things that feel great and wonderful,” Dhont adds.

“We rehearsed over the course of six months, spending a lot of time getting to know them, building confidence, and building comfort. I listened to them a lot, to the way they speak, to what they think is important. The script was like choreography. It’s not finished until it’s performed.”

I think when you put something into the world and when you care about something so much, it’s also about inviting conversation

One of the great highlights from December’s European Film Awards ceremony was 15-year-old Eden Dambrine’s gushing address to writer-director Lukas Dhont. The young actor met the Belgian filmmaker some two years earlier on a train. Dhont was struck by the youngster’s unusually large and expressive eyes. Dambrine was surprised by the director’s suggestion that he should audition for a role in his upcoming movie. He called his mother who, understandably, instructed the boy to: “Get off the train!”

“This is still a bit surreal for me,” said Dambrine from the stage of Reykjavík’s Opera House. “The last two years have been so exciting. I will never forget how we first met. I’m not going to lie. I was a bit scared at the beginning. During the movie, you explored this world with the whole team and with me. Finding the right gestures, the perfect looks and terrible silence. The result was wonderful. I am so happy and proud to be part of Close. Thank you so much.”

Dhont smiles and says: “That’s the wonderful thing, I think. Having made this film, we spent three crucial years in the lives of two boys growing up. We met them at the age of 12. And now they are 15. They have moustaches now. They speak differently. It’s been really powerful spending that very important moment in their lives and watching the very strong, powerful connections they have with each other.”

Meeting the thoughtful, sincere Dhont, it’s hard to reconcile his reputation as a controversialist. His debut feature, 2018′s Girl, won much acclaim and several awards, including the Camera d’Or, at the Cannes film festival.

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The film’s depiction of a transgender ballerina, inspired by the real-life experiences of Nora Monsecour, has subsequently drawn fire from trans rights activists for the casting of Victor Polster, a cisgender actor, in the primary role. Writing in Sight and Sound, Cathy Brennan observed: “Watching Girl I came to the horrifying realisation that my body as a trans woman is not my own”.

Speaking to this newspaper in 2019, Dhont addressed the criticisms, saying: “...as a director, at a certain point you have to cast the person you fall in love with for the part. You have to cast the person who inhabits the role in a mature way. And when Victor entered the classroom, I felt this was the person who could do that. And Nora very much felt the same way.”

He has, however, remained open to dialogue on the issue.

“I think when you put something into the world and when you care about something so much, it’s also about inviting conversation,” he says. “It’s about inviting different perspectives and listening to different ways of looking because I feel like we can always look for more answers. I really want to be open to other ways of looking. I want to understand.”

Close is in cinemas now