CraveOnline: Did any of the three women in Nemo’s life come from your life?
Jaco Van Dormael: Of course, all the women resemble a little bit. When I was a kid in Germany there were three little girls with three colored dresses like that in front of my house. They were called Annabella, Isabella and Florabella and it was quite surreal. They were always dressed the same way but in different colors. That’s an image that was in my mind for a long time.
Also when I moved from Germany to Belgium, I had the feeling that all my life in Germany was in a way continuing in my imagination. I never got back until 10 years later, so what Nemo lives by leaving England to come to Canada, stopping one life to get to another, it’s something I experienced probably as a kid. When I write something I always think it doesn’t have anything to do with myself. At the moment I realize okay, it probably has something to do because there are some resonances.
Here the three women, he loves her but she’s not sure if she loves him, or she loves him and he is not sure he loves her, and she loves him and he loves her. Those are the three relations with the three women. There could have been another relationship that would have been he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but it’s very short. The three balanced or unbalanced love relations are in the film and that’s his three women.
Jared Leto can be very choosy. How did you sell him on this film?
He was really fantastic. He was very involved as an actor and it was a good choice I think because he’s so good in characters, in being characters that don’t resemble himself at all. He loves that, to be somebody else. Here he has nine different Nemos to play and all the Nemos are different, not only by the way he looks but also from the inside, the voice, the way he walks, the way he breathes and he really could make nine different Nemos that were conformed by the different lives that they had. That is fantastic. I think for Jared, the most difficult was to make the ordinary man. The ordinary man with the woman, with two kids that has a job, that was really a composition.
The name Nemo has connotations here for the movie Finding Nemo. How did you choose the name?
Oh, it was because it means “nobody” in Latin. So it’s Nobody Nobody. It’s twice the same name. Nemo Nobody, Nobody Nemo or Nobody Nobody, the man who doesn’t exist.
You’ve only made three features, and the only one I’ve been able to see is Toto the Hero. Do you have more feature film ideas?
Yeah, I will do another. I’m a really slow film director. Perhaps I like writing too much so it takes a lot of time to write. Probably when I’m old I will be able to show all my films in a little afternoon to my grandchildren and they will say, “What else did you do in your life?” I’ll have to say, “Nothing. I just made that.” But no, I’m 55 now. I try to get faster. I try to write with other friends so next year I will make another film called God’s Daughter. It’s about God exists, he lives in Brussels with his daughter and it’s the story of the revenge of his daughter.
That sounds deep.
And surreal, yeah.
The other two films are not readily available in the States either. Do you know how we can see your other films?
Toto, I’m still trying to get it released again because it was released only on VHS in the ‘90s, so I hope to find a distributor that will just put it again on DVD and VOD. I think for the moment it doesn’t exist in America so probably you have to make it come from the U.K. I don’t know about The Eighth Day if it’s released or not on DVD.
Where do your surreal visions come from, things like the hand placing the car in a live action scene?
Really I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s very natural, probably because the story is told by a kid so at the moment, we are not in reality anymore. We are in the mind of the kid. When he constructs a world it’s a little bit like toys. I think it’s possible to make films like the Lumiere brothers did. Here we are in the reality, the train really arrives into the station. It’s possible to make films like Melies did where we are all in the imagination in a sort of dream, but in between what Lumiere did and what Melies did, between reality and imagination, there’s something that is very interesting which is perception.
It’s not about imagination, it’s not about reality but it’s about what is the perception of reality. It’s so different if I am a man or a dog or a butterfly or at one moment of my life or another moment of my life. What is the reality? Really, I don’t know. It’s just what my brain constructs with what I see, with what I hear, with my senses but I really don’t know what is reality. I think for everybody it’s something different or every moment of life it’s something different. What I wanted to make here is the idea of we are never in any kind of reality. We are in the mind, in the thoughts of somebody and the language resembles more how we think than how we look at something real. It’s a lot closer to the memory than to the reality.
How did you keep track of the nine different realities on the set when you were shooting?
When you construct your own labyrinth it’s very easy. I think for everybody on the set it was very easy because of the language of the colors. We tried to make visually something different in each life. The language of the camera is very different in each life. The light is different in each life. The set design and the colors are different in each life, just to make the labyrinth more clear, but it is a labyrinth. That is the game, to find the way out of the labyrinth.
For the audience, was it important to establish each of those worlds very quickly in the beginning, before we fully delve into them?
Yes, I think it can be confusing at the beginning because the beginning you receive all the keys that you will use later on. I tried to make it so that the story becomes more and more clear along the way. I tried, I tried. I hope I succeeded.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
