In this interview, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne discuss the making of their film The Unknown Girl, the sound design, and creating reality on screen.
Discover how other directors approach sound design.
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This interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne on The Unknown Girl was conducted in September 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Back in 2016, when The Unknown Girl screened at TIFF, I sat down with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne to discuss the film. They didn’t have a translator and didn’t speak much English. My French was rusty, but I could understand what they said. So we had a conversation in French.
It’s been sitting in my archives untranscribed and untranslated ever since. Until recently, I didn’t have the transcription software or the French skills to do it justice.
But I’ve thought back on this interview a lot in the intervening years. Like I often do, I asked the Dardennes about sound design. And like most directors, they loved talking about sound; I had the impression they don’t get to discuss it often. They were passionate about using real location sound in every take so the actors can actually respond to it in the take.
(That week, I also sat down with Cristian Mungiu who does ‘sound’ takes where the actors do all the actions in the scene without the dialogue. For example, he’d want to capture the sound of someone turning that particular doorknob on set. I can’t imagine the Dardennes ever even considering doing something so artificial. So they’re contrasting approaches have stuck in my mind.)
Sound in The Unknown Girl
Sound is especially important in The Unknown Girl because the inciting incident happens when the protagonist, Dr. Jenny (Adėle Haenel), ignores the sound of the doorbell at her clinic. She’s at the end of a long shift that’s already run late. She reasons that, if it were an emergency, they’d ring twice. The next day, she discovers that the woman who rang the doorbell is now dead. And Dr. Jenny can’t stop wondering, could she have saved her life? As Luc Dardenne put it, she becomes “obsessed.”
The sound of the doorbell doesn’t stand out as alarming or particularly loud that day in the clinic. The Dardennes shoot on location, and they selected a location for Dr. Jenny’s clinic that was adjacent to a highway. So there were always sounds of cars and patients that day – a constant din from which the doorbell felt entirely quotidian. Dr. Jenny didn’t know that this sound would have such a profound effect on her. It doesn’t stand out to us either amidst all the other chaos of the clinic. Importantly, they would have actually rung a doorbell that day because they would have wanted Haenel to respond (or ignore) that sound. You couldn’t get the same reaction had a doorbell been added in post.
An interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne from the archives
On the occasion of the latest film from the Dardennes, Young Mothers, premiering at Cannes this year, I present my 10-years-in-the-making interview with the Dardennes translated into English. They talk about the importance of casting and rehearsals, intuiting elements of the aesthetic that they can’t quite explain, and giving the actors the space to exist within the space and the frame.
7R: What was your rehearsal process for the film? What kind of planning goes into making the film feel so naturalistic?
Luc Dardenne: For us, the moment when we find the character and the shots is during the rehearsals. Even choosing the actors is very important: we are already choosing the faces, the bodies, and the voice of the characters. A good part of the film is already done.
We rehearse for five or six weeks on all films. Adėle [Haenel] also did some medical training for the film to learn the medical procedures. With Adėle, we did five weeks of rehearsal with a video camera. We operate ourselves and try out different shots. We say, “Less like this,” “More like that,” or “Try this.” She will find gestures for the character and find her performance. Together, we search for the character and the shots.
By the time we actually shoot the film, we feel that she has become the character. We feel that her gestures and her rhythms are all there, which we found in the rehearsals. Sometimes, when we’re filming, we’ll say, “Do it a bit slower. Do it a bit faster.” We might change the rhythms.
7R: How did you use the camera in the rehearsal? Do you watch what you do afterward? How does that affect that choreography of what you do?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: We watch what we did in the rehearsals to inspire us and help us move forward with the work.
Our goal is to find the simplest way to tell the story we want to tell. When we film, we want to have the feeling that we give things time to exist and happen. It shouldn’t feel like we are reconstructing something.
It is a bit of an obsession of ours to make sure that even if we have rehearsed a lot, it feels like things are really happening when we film.
7R: How do you do that?
Luc Dardenne: We like to shoot long takes. Because one take is never the same as another take. In a take that is three or four minutes long, there is a different tension, a different rhythm, the manner of speaking is different.
We are looking for the moment when the actors are there and present. There is a presence that is no longer constructed, which comes from their body. The camera is not making arbitrary movements. Something is connecting and breathing: we are no longer constructing it but recording it.
It doesn’t always work, but there are moments when we go, “Yes, that’s good.” But it’s intuition.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: It’s not an exact science.
Luc Dardenne: But we know when we both feel it.
7R: How did you approach making sure the supporting characters fit into this world?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: That’s thanks to the rehearsals. The purpose of the rehearsals is not only to find the form of the film but also to create an environment that allows everyone to really be present. We want the actors to know that their work will be received without judgment. They do not need to worry about looking ridiculous.
Because there are two of us directing, we talk to each other about our work and what we’re doing. And sometimes, we say, “No, we mustn’t do that. We made a mistake. We shouldn’t do that.”
But at the beginning, the actors are a little lost because they’re like “these crazy directors!” Normally, directors will never say when they’re wrong or have made a mistake. They lie…
Luc Dardenne: They’ll say, “It’s not my fault that it’s not right!”
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: But once the actors understand that instead of talking to ourselves in our heads we talk to each other, the actors also become part of that dialogue. It creates a rapport.
It creates the spirit of a troupe. When you’re a trapeze artist in the circus, you have to trust each other. You don’t jump into the void; the other person has to catch you.
That’s what we’re trying to create. We want to create an environment of mutual trust between everyone in the work.
We want the actors to actually be present and not worry about their technique.
Luc Dardenne: We also look for the costumes so that the actors look the way the characters should look during the rehearsals. We rehearse with the costumes and the real sets, which we paint for the rehearsals. There are often similar colours in the walls.
7R:There’s a lot of blue and white in the film.
Luc Dardenne: You mean, with Adėle?
7R: Yes, and also the walls. What made you choose those colours?
Luc Dardenne: It’s difficult to answer. It’s something that came while we were working.I don’t know. We saw this woman against a white wall talking on the telephone to the inspector. During the rehearsals, she was like that. We liked that.
We can’t really say why. It’s an intuition. We had the same intuition, saying, “Hold on. There is something that happens when she is in this colour, her face with the white wall.” It says something.
It’s as if we are in her head. There is a kind of emptiness. She is there all alone. Dr. Jenny is a woman who is very alone. There is a great solitude. Aside from the unknown girl, she is in her head all the time.
It just seemed right. But I don’t have a good explanation. We just felt it.
7R: This film and your last film, Two Days, One Night (2014), have a protagonist who encounters many other people, which opens us up to their perspectives and different ways of life. What interests you about telling these types of stories?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: Thanks to the fact that Jenny has this story with the investigation, it allows us access to other parts of society. We can make a portrait of that society.
Her patients who come to see her are people who are a little rejected, who are on the edge of society. They go to see her because she’s less expensive than other doctors. So it allowed us to show this part of society and also the loneliness of these people.
That’s what it allows us to do, but that’s not why we did it.
It’s true that going into people’s homes like that allows us to show a portrait of a part of our society. But it also allows us to take stock of those specific places.
7R: Can you tell me about the sound design? The background sounds feel very important to getting a sense of place. But we can always hear the actors even though you’re working with very long takes.
Luc Dardenne: First, we have a sound engineer who agrees to work with the sounds of the city. Of course, if there’s a truck or an ambulance, we stop shooting.
But otherwise, we want the actors to adapt to the sounds. Speak a little louder. Wait. Be quiet a little while we wait for the noise to decrease.
It changes the actor’s performance very strongly and forces them to react to the sound and become one with and connected to the setting. It creates a tension that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t a real silence.
Sound engineers will say, “yes, it’s nothing. We’ll do it in the mix.”
But for the actor, if the sound isn’t present with them in the scene, they cannot react in their performance to the sound and the noises in the scene. And that’s why it’s important for the sounds to really be there.
There’s a highway next to the clinic. For us, it was very important to hear, in the clinic, the sounds of people, cars, trucks – that economic and social life are continuing outside.
“The sound that Jenny didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear”
It seemed to us to create a drama of Dr. Jenny and this unknown woman who died from the sound that Jenny didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear. It seemed that this little derisory drama had an allure and seemed a little small compared to the life that goes on outside.
But why did this woman land on Dr. Jenny’s doorstop? Why is Jenny obsessed with what happened to her? It’s not Jenny’s fault that she’s dead. She didn’t kill her.
But Dr. Jenny has this obsession that nobody wants to have and that she succeeds at sharing, which is the whole point of the film. She is obsessed with someone else. She is possessed by someone else, by the unknown girl. That is something strange and particular.
And yet, life goes on.
That’s what we thought about when we built the sound and the film. We always tried to give it a rhythm. Because there are a lot of scenes in the office. We wanted them to have a rhythm. There’s also a lot of scenes at people’s houses when she goes to visit them.
A place on the border
But especially in the office, it’s a place that is a bit on the border. It’s a place where pariahs or outcasts go, where people who are rejected by society go. It’s not in the centre of the city of Liege; it’s next to a highway.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: The choice of our locations is also dictated by the sound. When we chose the location of the clinic, we knew that we would have to play with the noise of the surrounding area and organize ourselves to adapt to it.
We don’t reconstruct the sound later in a studio. We may add some details, but the main notes come from the actual shoot. That is very important to us.
Related reading/listening to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and The Unknown Girl
More Dardennes: Read our essay on La Promesse. Read our capsule on The Kid with the Bike, in our list of our favourite films of the 2010s. Listen to our Women at Cannes podcast in which we liken the Dardennes to the political alibi of Cannes.
More sound design: Compare how many of the best directors working today approach sound design.
