neither/nor
in the feature film, as well as a lot of interviews that we made which didn’t appear in the feature, more reportage, to fill the movie out to nearly an hour. But to me the style of it is not as good as the feature; it’s more classical, more straight reportage. It contains very interesting interviews and I’m glad that a wider audience has seen it because shown on TV but I should say that I mainly made it for financial reasons.
mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
To go back a little earlier, what was your filmmaking background like?
TZ: An important film for me is Vase de Noces, which was called Te Wedding Trough in English. It was also called Te Pig and I, but I disagree with that title. It was chosen by an American distributor in ’75 or ’76. You know how it is with the distributor. For me it’s a poetic film, and you have to see it on the big screen with good sound and picture. A pirate version on the Internet, it will just be boring or disgusting I think. For me there is a connection between Vase de Noces and Des Morts, because for me the essence and inspiration of both films, the fiction film and the documentary, is death, death and dying. So after making Vase de Noces, I got together with Dominique Garny, who was the actor in Vase de Noces, and we were thinking together about what we could do next, and very quickly we began thinking about making another film about death, not in the fiction mode, but as a documentary. But to me the two films are very much linked.
How did this group of collaborators come together? Were you coming out of a film school background?
TZ: Yes. In fact Dominique Garny and I were in the same film school, the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Brussels, but I was taking direction and he was taking acting. We were born in the same little town, we knew each other before entering film school. Te third member of the team, Jean-Pol Ferbus, was a friend of Dominique. It wasn’t always an easy collaboration— for me filmmaking was what I wanted to do, where for Dominique and Jean-Pol, the vocation was to be an actor. It was interesting to do this collaboration with people from different backgrounds, but it was not very easy, for emotional and psychological reasons. Sometimes we were helping each other, sometimes fighting with each
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