© bart dewaele Absolute AN EARLy DEVELOPER, INDRA SIERA BEgAN MAKINg COMMERCIALLy SPONSORED FILMS IN HIS TEENS. HE MOVED ON TO ADVERTS, BEFORE BEINg HIRED By STUDIO 100, THE BELgIAN ENTERTAINMENT gROUP SPECIALISINg IN CHILDREN’S AND FAMILy ENTERTAINMENT. THERE HE DIRECTED TV SERIES EPISODES AND THE FIRST TWO FILMS FEATURINg K3, A gIRL gROUP VERy POPULAR WITH BELgIAN AND DUTCH KIDS. BOTH PRODUCTIONS ENJOyED CONSIDERABLE LOCAL SUCCESS. SIERA HAS JUST FINISHED SIx EPISODES OF oLd BeLgium, A TELEVISION SERIES THAT AIMS AT SLIgHTLy MORE MATURE AUDIENCES. By Alex Masson control FrEAK
why did you become a film director? i always wanted to become a musician, then an actor. i quickly realised that i couldn’t do either. i didn’t have enough talent to become an actor, and since the quality of the music was so-so i turned towards the profession of directing (laughs). My father was a producer, and i spent a lot of time on set, where i became fascinated by the medium of cinema. i started early: i was 14 years old when i directed my first commercial commission, before shooting adverts… Before directing films for children… i needed the money (laughs)! it was an even more old-fashioned reason than that: after making several videos for producers of children’s programmes, they suggested that i direct a film. i said yes. but it was a great opportunity, particularly since that audience is very open. For example, children have already taken on board rapid editing. it seems that they liked my experiments in this area: K3 and the Magic Medallion was one of the ten most seen films in belgium in 2004. even so, i still believe that this was a coincidence (laughs). is it the desire to be a musician that gave this very musical rhythm to Old Belgium, particularly in its editing? that’s exactly what i wanted to do. i don’t want to point the finger at anyone, but i think that even if we have excellent directors in belgium, the directing is often very ‘old-fashioned’. it’s time that we got into the same habit as the current generation of american or british filmmakers, who have gradually learned to use the narrative conventions introduced by music videos. that remains complicated because there are few belgian producers who want to put money into films with this sort of visual language. in the medium term i would like it if we could make films that speak as much with their editing as with their dialogue. it’s not that i expect to excel in this area. i just want to find the best formal means of telling the stories that interest me. or simply to say to my backers: no problem, i’m going to communicate the message that you want to get across in a modern way. at first the producers of K3 and the Magic Medallion were really inflexible. they had a very precise idea of what this film should look like in order, in their eyes, to fit in a specific pigeonhole. i gradually tried to get them out of that rut, at the same time staying in the position that had been given to me. i’ve never had the temperament of a director who immediately wants to impose his ideas. that will come little by little. Old Belgium is a television series. today everybody agrees that television, and series in particular, is a more adventurous testing ground for form and narrative than the mainstream cinema. do you share this point of view? For a director, a tv series has more advantages than cinema: a bigger audience, more time to develop a story. with a film, you have at best two hours to do that. how could you not prefer the least mini-series of six one-hour episodes? and then i have to confess that i want my work to be seen by the largest possible group of people. in the cinema, you have to be a director of genius or have a very good scenario to have a success. For the moment, i’m only telling simple stories. the story of Old Belgium is the simplest… to which you nevertheless give a density through editing and wide-format images. it’s true. i’m a cameraman and i was anxious to shoot in the widest format possible, but with maximum of people in the picture. the feelings expressed in Old Belgium are universal, but very ordinary, very everyday. i wanted to give them a poetic dimension and force the viewer to seek out the characters on the screen, so that they bond with them, so that they are intrigued. in the same way, i use lots of symbols in the series. For example, when a man goes out the weather is terrible, when it is a woman, the weather is fine. sometimes it is a bit forced, i know, but i want to be sure that the viewers pick up the emotions that i want to convey. Are you the originator of Old Belgium, or was it commissioned, like the two K3 films? it’s a rather odd story. i was working on another tv series with stany crets and peter van den begin, the two lead actors of Old Belgium. they were in the process of writing the script for another producer, and stijn coninx was meant to direct it, but he left the project to go and direct Sister Smile. so stany and peter mentioned my name. i took over their scenario and brought my own ideas into it. in the end, you are credited as director, scriptwriter, cameraman and editor. would you call yourself a control freak? absolutely, but i don’t know why i need to have this control over things. that seems pretentious, i know, and authoritarian, but i don’t like having to justify myself in front of the crew. i’m the sort of person who tells a cameraman: go home, i’ll do it, come back when it’s finished. the same with a scriptwriter or an editor. i hope that the result is sufficient to demonstrate where i’m coming from. evidently, that caused a bit of conflict on the shoot. you don’t have much time and even less money. even so, the pace was 75 shots a day – 150 when we had two cameras. that was really very hard on the actors, but in the end it all went well, in part because i knew where i wanted to go. Old Belgium is firmly rooted in one decade, the 1970s, of which you can only have a child’s memories… …i was born in 1972, so i was a child at the time when the events in Old Belgium take place. that decade is a strange period. i retain the 23 in FOcUs
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