“Coward”, interview with director Lukas Dhont

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont returns to the Cannes competition for the second time with “Coward“, a queer romantic drama set during the First World War. After “Girl”, which won the Caméra d’Or in Un Certain Regard in 2018, and “Close“, Grand Prix winner in 2022, Lukas Dhont‘s third feature follows Pierre, a young soldier newly arrived at the Belgian front, and Francis, a flamboyant comrade who organises a theatre show to lift the spirits of the men around him. While violence rages, both find ways to escape the brutality of war, even if only for a moment. The film stars Emmanuel Macchia, in his screen debut, alongside Valentin Campagne. The film will be distributed by MUBI.

A photograph that changed everything

The film began with a series of black-and-white photographs Lukas Dhont stumbled upon four years ago. They showed young soldiers stationed in a waiting camp behind the front lines, performing a small theatre piece for each other using the tools of war: munition boxes turned into a podium, sandbags into skirts, bullets into jewellery. As a Belgian, Lukas Dhont grew up driving through the fields where the battle was fought, yet he had never been told about this phenomenon. “I was really confronted with the politics of memory, in the sense that there are certain images of violence and brutality that we have always pushed to the front and buried underneath them are these expressions of freedom“. The discovery sparked something deeper: a film about how, in the darkest of times, people have tried to stay human by creating or by looking for the creations of others.

Secrecy as sensuality

One of the film’s central challenges was writing a love story in which the two protagonists could never be alone. Lukas Dhont drew inspiration from the poetry of the period, where queer desire lingers between the lines, and from the literature of writers like Jane Austen, where what cannot be said is expressed through micro-gestures. “I thought secrecy can also be incredibly sexy. Sharing a secret with someone, sharing a passion and a desire and having to experience that in public while you are the only two who know, that can be incredibly sensual“.

Resisting the codes of the world

Behind the theatre and the love story lies a political dimension. Lukas Dhont discovered that Belgian soldiers who tried to desert were executed, imprisoned or forced to disappear into invisible lives, never able to return home. He found in those hidden existences a resonance with the queer experience of the time: people who had to live in camouflage and love hidden in plain sight. “For me the film is really about people who have resisted throughout time the codes of the world that they are brought up in“. The title itself carries that charge: in a genre where heroism is measured by the capacity to harm, Lukas Dhont reclaims the word coward as something closer to courage.

Finding Emmanuel

Before becoming a director, Lukas Dhont worked extensively in casting, and he describes it as his favourite part of the filmmaking process. For the role of Pierre, a farmer’s son, he visited agriculture schools across Belgium. Emmanuel Macchia was there, timid, barely using the full register of his voice. “When I got to know him more, I discovered he is an incredible cinephile because he was on “Letterboxd” giving reviews to “Cinema Paradiso”. And then I just discovered this soul that felt very timeless“. Lukas Dhont paired him with Valentin Campagne, his opposite: loud, performative, someone who takes up space. The combination worked because Campagne drew Emmanuel Macchia out, while Macchia grounded Campagne. When working with young people, Dhont says, he likes to cast those who resonate with the role, because he knows they will become co-authors of the part.

Against the hero

Lukas Dhont is open about his complicated relationship with war films, a genre he says has traditionally offered men a very limited space to exist, where value is measured by the ability to act heroic, which in that definition means the ability to harm or kill. “As a young man growing up and trying to look for mirrors, I always felt a sense of shame because I thought I would never really be capable of that. I always felt much more like a coward than I felt like a hero“. Among the few war films he admires, he cites Jean Renoir‘s “Grand Illusion”, for its insight that the idea of an enemy is a construction, and Stanley Kubrick‘s “Fear and Desire”, for its intelligence in depicting an undefined conflict, allowing the film to speak about war in general rather than a specific moment in time.

Plot