Interview: Laura Wandel on working with child actors in Belgium's Oscar finalist 'Playground'

by Nathaniel R

This season's finalist list for the Best International Feature Film Oscar is a mixture of international icons (Farhadi! Sorrentino!), legends in the making (Hamaguchi! Trier!) and rising auteurs (everyone else). Four of the films are even directorial debuts. Imagine being shortlisted for the Oscar on your first movie! That's what's happened to Belgium's Laura Wandel.

The 37 year old filmmaker had been making short films since 2007. After her 2014 short Les corps éstrangers competed at Cannes, it was time to make the leap to features. The result, which was tabled for a time due to pandemic delays, was the moving bullying drama Playground about a brother and sister struggling in school. We were delighted to speak to Wandel shortly after her moving film made the finals...

[This interview was conducted through a translator and is edited for length and clarity]

NATHANIEL: What films about childhood or school did you look to for guidance when making this... I thought briefly of Ponette while watching. I love that film so I mean this as a huge compliment.

LAURA WANDEL: Ponette indeed, among others. But also Recreations a documentary by Claire Simon and of course Elephant by Gus Van Sant. 

Interesting. Your lead actors look so much like siblings that I was surprised to learn they weren't. How did you cast them?

Maya Vanderbeque and Günter Duret star in "Playground"

We went through a regular casting process. I saw some 200 little girls for the role of Nora. When Maya came in, she really stood out from the rest and then she said this incredible thing to me for a seven-year-old to say, that I will never forget, 'I will give all my strength to your film'. Then we did the tests and the camera loved her. I was immediately sure I had found my Nora. I knew I could not make a mistake there. If I did not cast the right child, my film would be a failure. 

Günter, who plays Abel, unlike Maya, had some acting experience already. He was really good so we actually died Maya’s hair darker so that they would look more alike. Then, we spent a lot of time together, Maya and I and then the three of us, so that they would bond like real siblings. 

It worked! You wrote the screenplay but given that these were child actors, how much was them learning lines or did you approach it more like improvised scene-work? 

It was very important for me to involve the children from the very beginning in the creative process. I knew from the start that I did not want them to "read" the script.  We enlisted the help of an orthopedagogist, a learning coach, who came up with a method to help the children distance themselves from their characters. We worked for over two months with them

It sounds like a very involved process. 

The first step was that we asked the actors to create a puppet of their character and to talk through the puppet. So that they would understand the difference between themselves and the puppet. The second step was that we would explain the beginning of a scene and we would ask them to imagine the rest through the puppet.  The third step was improvisation, so that they would involve their bodies as well. Often they would come up with lines of dialogues that were much better than what I had written and I would go back to my script and integrate their suggestions.

The last step was that we would ask them to draw each scene so that at the end of the rehearsals, they would have their own little storyboard, drawn by themselves. And so when principal photography started, they carried their own storyboard and could go back to their drawings to understand what kind of emotion they needed to project for a specific scene.

It all really adds up as it plays so naturally.

During principal photography, we would film all the time. Sometimes even when they had completely forgotten the camera was there. For instance, the sandwich scene is one of those moments that the children brought to the film. 

How do you feel about representing Belgium to represent them at the Oscars? 

I am terribly proud to represent my country on this shortlist, in particular also, I am proud that this is a 100% Belgian film. Our small country is very divided, with two different languages, but it got funding and actors from both communities. I am very happy about that.

The director and her stars at Cannes last summer

Were you surprised to make the Oscar finals?

It's totally incredible for me -- especially for a first film! I still can’t believe the journey my film went through over the last year. Especially as we had to put the film in the fridge for a year during the pandemic. It then opened in Cannes and it was such an emotional time. And then it won the Fipresci Award. Now being on the shortlist among these big names like Paolo Sorrentino and Asghar Farhadi… this is already much more than whatever I could have dreamt of!

Do you have any idea what you'll do as a follow up? 

I am working on something already, it is at a very early stage, it will not be about children but children will be involved. I'm happy this next project was selected by the CINEFONDATION workshop of the Cannes film festival to help me through the writing stage. 

Best International Feature Film competition
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