"I started making movies when I was in film school here in Brussels, at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion." "My first creations were realized there." "Before that I used to be a photographer since I was a teenager." "It was not until film school that I started asking myself questions about cinematographic technique and language." "My interest in cinema started pretty late because before that, I was fascinated by comics." "I used to draw them all the time, even on the pages of my books." "When I was 16 or 17, I went to the theater for the first time." "And I realized there what I wanted to do." "I was in high school and I asked the director and the actors to come to my school for a meeting." "And I said to myself that this was the life I wanted to live." "I started attending a school here in Brussels about cinema, radio, theater and television." "I wanted to be a director and actor in theater." "We used to share some classes with cinema students and we had the chance to see movies for free at the cinema." "There were passionate teachers like the famous Belgian director Henri Storck - ...who has actually passed away - ...with whom we could analyze movies in every detail or study the art of Luis Buñuel." "That's how cinema started to fascinate me." "In 1968 I loved Pasolini, just like Thierry, and Ingmar Bergman movies." "I even did a seminar with him right after my studies because I had a role in a piece directed by a Belgian author who used to be one of Bergman's assistants." "He liked me, and we became friends." "So he gave me the opportunity to join the Ecole du Theâtre National for being present while Bergman was directing." "I felt really small next to him." "But many aspects of cinema interested me and this interest still lives in me as a viewer." "I've started my cinema studies in 1968 a very important year for student movements and for society." "It didn't affect my work as a director but it was important for the political and social context of that time because when someone wanted to have a creative and artistic career he had to change the existing rules do researches, go further than anyone else did do the so-called "experimental"." "It was natural for me to do something that wasn't made before and to have an interest in people who did experimental works." "Not only in cinema but also in literature, painting, every kind of art." "This was the artistic situation in those days at the end of the 60's and at the beginning of the 70's." "I remember meeting Thierry when he asked me about my school of dramatic arts and cinema." "I was in my first year, we were living in a town called Namur and he asked me about the admission exam to my school and all that." "Our friendship was born at that very moment." "I'm completely fascinated by the beginning of cinema." "I love the great classics directed by" "Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov just to name the great European directors but I was fascinated by early American cinema as well." "I wasn't very interested in the cinema of the 20's, 30's and 40's even though, later I saw several masterpieces created in that period." "To me, the renewal of cinema started with the Nouvelle Vague." "I was fascinated by the ancestors of cinema and by the French authors of the Nouvelle Vague." "But after the Nouvelle Vague, at the end of the 60's I had other influences, like Pasolini or the Japanese cinema." "I remember a movie called Woman in the Dunes which completely captivated me." "I was also interested in the New German Cinema like the movies of Wim Wenders even though we have very different styles." "But I loved his movies as a viewer, I was very interested." "Or Werner Herzog, of course." "A movie like The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser has something in common with the autistic character of Vase de noces." "It was at the end of my studies when Thierry showed me some papers and described me this character he wanted to portray:" "Someone who has probably never met anyone else in his life." "Then he described me some sequences like him having sexual intercourse with a sow with whom he'll have children, and he will take care of them." "He will be living among animals." "I was absolutely fascinated, especially because I'm from the Ardennes - ...as we call them in Belgium - where there are big forests in which I've always loved to walk and to spend my holidays." "Thierry's idea of a man alone with the animals seduced me and we started this adventure knowing that it wouldn't be easy." "There were several elements that, mixed together, created a script." "One of these elements was my interest in painting for example the works of Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Brueghel." "Maybe more Bosch than Brueghel." "Many of his paintings are just like movies." "If we look at them with a magnifying glass and follow every image, it's just like watching a movie." "Many details of Bosch's paintings can be seen in Vase de noces." "I won't say which ones, but the viewer can have fun in discovering them." "So it's true that I was really into" "Flemish paintings of the 16th century but I was also deeply influenced by Art Brut ("Outsider Art")." "Jean Dubuffet talked a lot about it at the end of the 60's." "It's a kind of art realized by people completely out of any cultural context." "They were often people from the psychiatric hospitals but in this category - even though" "I don't like talking about categories - ...there were people trying to explore their subconscious without worrying about being understood, liked or accepted." "It was the transmission of an inner world through their art and their words." "Those were the major influences, but there were others as well." "For example, I was interested in psychoanalysis and symbolism." "Jung's book about alchemy was an important element in the writing process." "Another important book is the one by Milarepa who was an Indian or Nepalese ascetic." "It's been a long time since I last read his book but I think the sequence where Dominique eats nettles is influenced by Milarepa." "Bataille was another author who might have influenced my taste and my way of writing." "But I'm not an unconditional admirer of his works." "At that time, I was more influenced by Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty." "His conception of cruelty is not far from the one treated in Vase de noces." "I did the writing together with Dominique." "The script was very detailed concerning the atmosphere and the storyline but the composition of each sequence was more random." "We had a screenplay with the beginning, the progression of the events the consequences and the end but we didn't know in which order we could shoot it and we didn't want to know it." "We had a kind of a diary in which we used to write the different sequences we had to shoot." "We chose what to shoot according to the climatic condition or to the reactions of the animals because they weren't tamed and they kept on living their life while Dominique was playing among them and with them." "When an animal had a particular reaction - ...like when the sow started running and screaming - ...we shot it because we knew we needed that for the movie." "We never said something like "we will shoot the sequence with the screaming sow on this particular day"." "In the evening we used to choose which page of the script we will play the following day." "If the character takes a bath or shares his lunch with the little pigs or knits a cardigan for them." "I remember the anxiety of doing a good performance, and I've always kept it." "It was a haunting anxiety." "I was afraid to fail." "Because of that I had an inner will mixed with fear that made my performance more dynamic." "When I see the movie I notice this anxiety because the protagonist's hands are shaking very much." "And I think that in the second half of the movie when the character self-destructs himself I was surprised to realize that I was expressing his unhappiness without knowing how to feel it because the character was a stranger, and I was just playing him." "That's an experience we will never forget." "There was some snow, even if it's not shown in the movie." "And when I'm almost naked, burying myself, my body feels the cold." "When I take a bath in the basin, I scream but it changes into a chant." "It was an extreme experience to show the vulnerability and the purity of the character." "I wasn't completely into the character." "I used to play little parts of him every day." "It's due to the magic of editing that every bit fell into place." "I was surprised to see that the character cries." "I didn't remember crying that much." "It's an extreme experience." "It's difficult to find something similar in other movies." "Especially in this kind of cinema which doesn't offer the actors much chance to improvise or to show the details of a character." "I can't say much more, but it was a difficult role." "Obviously, since we conceived this movie together Dominique had to play the role." "The movie was written for his physical capacities and his sensibility." "We studied together at the film school in Brussels and before being a working partner, Dominique was a friend and he just had to be the star of the movie." "The word "vase" has two meanings in French:" ""Le vase" means "vase" or "container" but also "mud", the mixture of water and soil." "These two meanings are very interesting." "I remember that when we were shooting the movie Dominique was reading a book by Max Ernst in which the author says that we should confess our sins to a priest." "Since in the 19th century it was necessary to be prudish even when confessing, they used to say if they had sinned with the front or the rear vase (i.e. The vagina or anus)." "I think that the humor we found in this example with the word "vase" showed us that its significance in the movie was that of a container." "In the alchemic allegories, the vase had a primordial meaning." "It's in the vase that the alchemist mixes the elements that will transform into something else or corrode some other material." "And that's another reference to the sexual connotation I've mentioned before." ""La vase", "the mud" was very important for us because the movie plays a lot on the four elements:" "Air, water, soil and fire." "The mud is a mixture of two elements, soil and water." "It's like the mud of the world before there were human beings." "It's something primitive in the history of the earth long before the history of humanity." "These two words were very coherent with the idea we want to convey." "The word "noces", ("wedding") is probably influenced by" ""The Peasant Wedding", a Brueghel painting." "But it's intended in a wider meaning too:" "It's about marriage, copulation." "Since the French word can be masculine or feminine it's also a celebration of nature, of male and female." "The movie had several English titles created by distributors or exploiters without even consulting me." "Our US distributor called the movie "The Pig and I"." "It wasn't offensive, but it was too light for the story." "The official English title for us was "Wedding Trough"." "The "trough" is the manger where the pig can go eat but also, in a more general meaning, a container." "And the etymology of the word "wedding" comes from French." "Some of the film's music was chosen before shooting it." "For example, Monteverdi's "Vespers of the Blessed Virgin" was a piece of music that I and Dominique loved very much." "Of course, some sequences of the movie were written in order to feature a certain music." "This was the case with Monteverdi." "Alain Pierre's music was written for the movie during the editing, when we showed the images to the composer." "There's also some anonymous Italian music from the 16th century." "It's a mix." "There's also some Pérotin, which was close to the religious music of monks." "There's a mystic connotation in the choice of music except for the anonymous Italian music." "It puts the movie into an occidental context since the composers were occidental - ...except for Alain Pierre and his electro-acoustic music - ...and conveys a reminiscence of a disappeared civilization." "We shot the movie in black and white because I wanted to." "I didn't want to do the movie in color." "Amongst my inspirations was the art of engraving." "I've always been fascinated by the black, white and gray contrasts and I've always thought about the movie as a black and white one." "Maybe because of my love for the films from the beginning of the cinema." "Shooting it in black and white was okay but the problem was to find the film stock." "Dominique will tell you how we got the black and white film stock and could finally shoot the movie." "I haven't been worried about getting the funds for the movie because there weren't any and we decided to keep on living as simple as we always did." "When Thierry and I were living together in Brussels we also accommodated one of our teachers." "He was American, and he taught independent cinema." "He came with his family and two boxers that damaged every door in the house." "Some months later, as a thank-you-gift he sent us a big box containing many 30 meters film reels in black and white." "They belonged to the American Army." "They were used in cameras on the wings of bombers that filmed the bombings and their aftermaths." "So we finally had the film stock for doing the movie even if we didn't know its quality." "But luckily, we didn't have any problems." "An interesting thing to underline is that the shooting was done in little segments because the camera was empty very quick and we had to cover it with a blanket to change the film reel." "We didn't have a big budget and it certainly interfered with the work we did." "Since we are talking about the film reel I have to do a technical clarification that always astonishes many people:" "The negative didn't have footage marker numbers." "People who work in filmmaking know that a work copy is printed from the negative and once the work copy is finished, you have to cut the negative to print all the other copies." "All the little numbers printed on the perforation of the film - ...which are invisible in the movie itself - ...allow the negative editor to create an identical copy of the work print." "This film stock we had, didn't have marker numbers." "I always knew that." "It wasn't a bad surprise at the last minute but we didn't have the money to buy another film negative so I decided to write the little numbers on the film myself, with Indian ink." "Not every foot, but about every one or two meters - ...especially in the longest shots " "I wrote all of the marker numbers by hand." "When the editor saw my scribe work he asked me if I was crazy, and I answered: "Yes, maybe..."" "The movie was conceived as being without dialogue." "We don't know if the character has ever spoken in his life if language lies behind him or if it's ahead of him, and he still has to learn how to speak." "One thing is for sure:" "This man was emblematic for the human condition so he couldn't be linked to a specific culture or language." "We put some elements into the film that could give the idea or the memory of a past culture now gone." "When he does the sign of the cross or rings the bell it gives a reference to a Christian past that belonged to a previous era before a new Flood." "These gestures look like an unconditional reflex that he does without knowing their symbolic meaning anymore." "This character is so mysterious, it's impossible to describe it." "I wanted to be this character and I didn't have much introspection." "I built the character according to what was written in the script." "There wasn't anything theoretical about it." "I didn't change anything and I didn't try to find a particular gestural expressiveness." "Everything came spontaneous like the rag shoes I made the way I walked, and the roughness of the tools." "I've used my capacities, there was nothing theoretical about it." "And I didn't change anything." "Our crew was very small." "Dominique was the only actor even if we can say that all the animals in the barnyard were actors too." "I didn't do a particular casting but I have to say that I didn't want just any sow." "I wanted an average one, neither too big nor small." "We also chose what kind of poultry we wanted for the movie." "This was the cast." "Concerning the technical crew, we had a sound engineer I was the camera operator and there was a third person who helped us from time to time but who wasn't there all the time." "I lived the days of the shooting like if I was in a state of trance." "We were isolated, and the three of us used to sleep near the location." "Our lives were completely absorbed by the atmosphere of the movie." "We took care of many things like feeding the animals or working on some other logistical aspects." "There wasn't a separation between our roles like he takes care of the sound, he takes care of the image." "Everyone cooperated, doing basically everything that had to be done." "We spent a month shooting and we spent it completely immersed into the story and into this kind of madness we were living." "Maybe the word "trance" is a bit exaggerated but we didn't have something like a shooting schedule telling us when to start and when to stop." "It was a creative moment, but also a personal experience." "We had no discipline." "I don't remember us saving anything just for the sake of saving." "I remember Thierry looking through his camera asking me to do the same action while he was shooting it from a different angle." "Sometimes he felt that the take wasn't good so we did it again in a slightly different way." "The location was probably the last element I found for the movie." "We wanted to do a movie with several ingredients that we added to the script as we went along." "When Dominique and I discovered this location - ...which actually was the outbuilding of a castle, its farm - ...in the Walloon country here in Belgium it was like the catalyser that gave shape to all the other elements we prepared once the script was finished." "So we said to ourselves that we were ready to shoot." "A very grueling sequence was a wide shot where my character looks lost and walks towards the camera in a ploughed field." "When we start to recognize him his face shows a tortured soul." "It wasn't a real torture, but I was feeling the torture of the cold - ...that was real - but also his inner sufferings." "It was very difficult for me, and my face shows that." "The character wants to die, and at that moment I had to identify myself with him, which was difficult." "There are many allegories in the movie and I can't say that one interpretation is better than another." "A very vague word which is also very precise is "poetry"." "I think we made a poetic movie." "Poetry exists in nature." "It doesn't need explanations." "It's a natural event." "The viewer, the reader or whoever deals with it searches for different keys to understand it from an intellectual point of view." "Sometimes this kind of interpretation can help the viewer to live through a tough or an unbearable movie." "It can reassure him in front of something that seems incoherent." "There is this kind of allegory and many others." "In the opening sequence, Dominique put a doll head on the head of a pigeon transforming it into an angel." "This angel is supposed to fly, but he can't make it." "This symbolism will return in the middle of the movie with the kite scene and at the end with the symbolism of the human being after the process of the decomposition of his ego after eating and vomiting his feces for purifying and becoming pure spirit." "Since there is always a symbolism in a story in this story, this character wants to commit suicide as if he wanted to admit his failure and the impossibility for human beings to transcend their essence." "Suicide is the symbol of failure." "But after hanging himself, this human being starts to fly as if he finally found what he was looking for, and he thought he couldn't find." "So he became lighter than air an immortal being who could reach the air and fly away." "Since he thought he might be wrong, he put a rope around his neck to keep the being made of wind or of infinity that he became to the ground." "This death is not realistic since the character flies away." "He has killed, but as you know, we didn't kill any of the animals." "Some of them have been lightly narcotized and I took care of them afterwards." "Everything was fictitious." "The power of editing and black and white cinematography add a kind of cruelty that I didn't feel while I was playing it." "There are several symbolisms in a kite flying over the sky." "There's something flying and there's a thread linked to it." "There's also a person who holds the thread." "This barely visible thread - ...because it's too thin in contrast to the brightness of the sky - ...is the most important element." "It's a link between the material human being with his feet on the ground who is made of flesh, and a flying, dancing spirit in the wind." "There's also another element:" "The wind that makes the kite fly." "The human being is linked to an eternal world, an invisible world." "We see the delivery of the sow, and the character takes a piglet in his hands." "It's a joy for him to have a baby." "There's a question we have been asked many times:" "In the movie, we see some dead piglets." "I've always said to people who asked me about it that we always used already dead piglets." "This is something pretty frequent:" "Normally, a sow delivers 14 piglets and the tenant farmer always checks the bottom of its vagina to see if there's any dead piglet left." "So the following day, we used two or three already dead piglets to pretend we hanged them." "It's a key sequence of the movie." "We see that this man who looked like he loved them so much becomes torn after he killed them." "But we only used piglets that were born dead." "There's a sequence in the movie where the sow rings the bell." "We should ask it why it does that, I don't know the reason." "There was a bell tower, but there wasn't a bell." "We added the sound of the bell later." "The farmer lent us the sow, but we couldn't use it whenever we wanted." "We had to wait for the right moment for it to be killed by the farmer." "The movie was almost finished and we had to postpone all the sequences with the dead sow." "Like the one when I took it out of the pit and gave it a burial." "We shot in chronological order, but had to wait before shooting that." "The season wasn't the same as in the other sequences so we had to be careful for the link shots since the vegetation was slightly different." "There are many religious connotations in Vase de noces." "I've spent my childhood in a Catholic environment and it took me some time to get over it and keep my distance from this typical Catholic environment of the 50's." "My knowledge of the Bible and of many Catholic rituals probably inspired me." "The piglets might come from Disney's "Three Little Pigs" but also from the Gospels where there's an episode with Jesus doing an exorcism and transferring the devil into the pigs." "There are these elements, but it's possible to find them in other kinds of art, too." "A piece of work containing Catholic elements is not necessarily a Catholic work." "In Bosch's paintings there are many references to religion but they have a symbolic value that goes beyond a simple religion." "Some symbols can be more universal than the ones that might have influenced a childhood." "When the character is reborn after burying himself it's a kind of resurrection." "At the end of the movie, there's a kind of Assumption when the character tries to reach for the sky." "Those are religious elements, but not exclusively." "We can find the act of burying himself in other cultures and in ascetic and mystic religions." "The archetype of leaving the earth to reach the sky is an universal symbolism." "Many people, talking about the movie, called it "the movie with the pig"." "It's true that the relation with the pig and the whole first part of the movie - ...when the character is seen living with the animals - ...is important." "But to me, the most important part is the second half." "The man is alone and he tries some experiment that I consider alchemic:" "Searching for the secret of life trying to push his body to its limits following the natural needs of eating and defecating." "To find the key to immortality he has to transcend what he is, as well as the material laws of his body." "Coprophagy is connected to certain attitudes of babies because babies are interested in what comes out of their body, their excrements." "It's not rare for a baby to eat his feces to discover their taste." "This has a psychoanalytic connotation but also a symbolic one." "The excrement can be considered as the image of the mutating matter and as the image of this alchemist who uses the roughest and simplest elements possible to find the secrets of immortality." "We basically shot all scenes in chronological order and I had to carry the whole weight of the movie." "I knew that my character couldn't stand the disgusting things he eats." "There's no need for telling the recipes." "It was necessary to remember how to swallow when we are sick and I had to do some rehearsals." "But at that moment of the shooting every take was successful." "What I eat is more or less eatable." "Thierry didn't know that before this sequence I did something to get stomach-ache because" "I didn't want to just simulate the vomit." "I remember that I drank some beer that I opened four or five days before, in order to get sick." "This is the job of the actor." "That's what we've been trained for." "I think that everyone of us - I include myself in this category - ...has a responsibility." "We know we have to get sick and everyone has to find his own way to do it." "Someone might eat burned matches or whatever." "This is how to prepare it, you see?" "But I have to say that Vase de noces has been a memorable experience." "I've met many viewers of the movie who told me:" ""You certainly had quite an experience, and you really made us feel it." "Your experience must have been very intense."" "And that's true." "During the second half of the movie, all the excrements pieces of food and vegetables are put into jars as if he wanted to have a collection or a library to extend his knowledge and his mind." "Something that could be useful in the future." "Something he could consult just like a book that could be read again in the future." "Concerning the sexual intercourse with the sow and the consequent impregnation:" "Thierry and I didn't talk about it." "We simply said:" ""This afternoon we will shoot the mating between the man and the sow."" "Thierry chose a heightened shot from a window and the rest is pure theater improvisation." "The actor has to play and he has to be believable." "Then Thierry took a shot from a lower position showing a part of the sow's body." "I understood it and I did it." "Of course it's not an intromission filmed with a telephoto lens." "It's just the conjugation of the rhythm of the pursuit between the characters for the mating." "After that, we added the music with lots of discretion." "I've never wanted to answer people who asked me if it was a real penetration because this is a matter of the work of the actor." "Thinking back about the movie I can say that it was particularly distressing because in my naivety I thought about how to make this intercourse believable by showing the sexual act but also the rest right after the ejaculation and the tenderness towards such an improbable partner." "It was necessary to show the sexuality like a real adventure in his humanity." "At the end of movie we see the ladder." "We see it for the first time when he uses it to retrieve the sow after its suicide when it threw itself into the pit - which is also the heart of the garden - ...and entered into the ground, we could say through that pit." "Dominique uses the ladder to retrieve the sow and to prepare its funeral." "He uses it as a stretcher." "I don't know if that was a direct inspiration but in certain cultures the dead are transported on stretchers like that." "So it looks like a funeral procession." "In the very last sequence, he uses the ladder for his suicide." "That's also a mythological archetype because men wanted to reach for Heaven, to reach for God." "I don't remember if it's in the Bible or in a Brueghel's painting but there's this kind of Jacob's Ladder that men use persistently for transcending their beings and to reach for the impossible." "The movie is a purification quest but also a quest for everything that can be spiritual in the carnal aspects of our body something spiritual in the material." "I can't enter the viewers' heads." "There's the viewer who will love it and watches it until the end the viewer who will watch it until the end without loving it the viewer who will leave the movie after a while..." "I think an author shouldn't be in the viewer's head." "A viewer should feel free to like the film or not to ask himself questions about it or to just watch it." "Well, if someone watches the movie without delving into it that's up to the viewer." "It's okay with me." "But he certainly misses many of the things I wanted to say." "I don't think that art has to have a moral limit." "I don't know how to say it..." "I've never thought about it." "I'm not a violent person." "But certainly, art has to be violent." "Since I'm an admirer of Ingmar Bergman I've recently seen one of his classic movies:" "Cries and Whispers." "There's a very disturbing sequence where one of the actresses mutilates her sex with fragments of glass and then she shows it to her husband saying "no" to him." "That's undoubtedly violent, but it belongs to art just like the paintings of Goya or some of Baudelaire's poems describing cooked fetuses eaten during some banquets." "Art has no limits towards death." "Even when in cinema an already dead animal is used to underline human cruelty." "The movie received lukewarm reactions." "It created a scandal, it has been heavily banned and it started many passions, positive and negative." "The first screenings of the movie were in a privileged context because it was at the Experimental Cinema Festival in Knokke." "So it was in an environment of artists who also played with formal experimentalism arguing about what cinema could be but also what its content could be just like the shocking aspects of what is shown in the movie." "This audience for experimental films couldn't be shocked so the first reactions were positive." "And the people who criticized it did it especially because of its narrative structure in an experimental context where the filmmakers used to give more care to the form than to the content." "I thought it was important to care about the form but I wanted to give it an important content as well." "I didn't consider a narrative thread as a classic element of the story because narration can be classic, but doesn't necessarily have to be." "So the ones who could criticize the movie in that context did it because they thought it didn't go very far from a formal point of view." "After this festival, the movie was screened to other audiences like the Cannes Festival and others." "And the people there didn't have any a priori about an experimental movie or a disturbing one." "The contestations and the criticisms were so much more numerous because of the contents of the movie - zoophilia, coprophagy - ...but also because of the structure of the movie itself." "Especially from those who expected to see a classic and commercial movie and found a black and white one without any dialogue." "There's a funny fact:" "Someone summarized the shortcomings of the movie in one sentence at the end of the screening in Portugal:" ""That's not a movie!" "There's no dialogue, no color, no women!"" "In this wide audience context, it's true that the public was in disarray." "At this kind of festival, there's always someone who likes to raise a scandal and who loves to write polemic, venomous articles." "So there was a big controversy about the movie." "In Belgium, there's no official censorship so the movie had a theatrical release." "The only danger in Belgium comes from a hidden government censorship." "When a movie like that is distributed it has very few chances of being commercially successful." "And it's almost impossible to distribute it without the help of the government." "This funding was granted only to movies that had a particular quality." "And the commission that examined it thought that Vase de noces didn't have that quality and so we couldn't get the government funding." "So it's an indirect censorship." "We had a much more direct censorship in Australia." "When Dominique and I arrived at the airport the distributor awaited us in a desperate mood." "He told us that the movie was banned and we were allowed to screen it only that day at the festival because the censorship forbade it." "From the airport, we had to drive to the theatre - ...we had arrived a few hours before the screening - ...and I saw that surrounding the theater there were traffic jams and a demonstration." "So I said to the distributor:" ""We're out of luck, there's a demonstration on the day of our screening."" "He replied: "Look at their posters." "They are against the movie."" "The archbishop had asked his people to demonstrate against the movie." "After the screening I had to face the censorship commission to defend my film." "They were satisfied about my words because they said:" ""Alright, the film may be released in Australia but it'll be necessary to insert a title card at the beginning of the movie with a resume of your speech, explaining its intentions."" "I have memories of what happened after the movie." "I remember very painful interviews in France." "I remember demonstrations against me by religious organizations." "But I have one very special sorrow:" "The false stories about the movie that kept the viewers away." "Those lies deceived the fans of ugly and provocative dirty movies and kept the viewers away from the movie who were looking for poetry." "This is very cruel for someone who made the film." "It's a nail in my heart." "At that time, a politician, Mr. Poniatowski, said at the Assemblée Nationale:" ""There's a movie that will never arrive in France:" "It's called Vase de noces."" "Lmportant journalists sometimes wrote reviews about the movie that were too light." "It wasn't difficult to understand that they hadn't even seen it." "One thing that hurt me was that a scandal was created where there wasn't any and thus preventing people from watching a movie that we would have loved to share with them showing the life of this character who is so special and who makes us dream because he takes good care of the piglets giving them food, even dishes to eat in he hand-knit cardigans for them, he plays with a kite..." "Everyone would love to meet such a character." "We had a censorship problem in France as well." "It was the time when movies were given the X-rating there." "Before that, a movie could be authorized or forbidden." "When they started with the X-rating those movies didn't receive any financial funding from the Government." "And they also used this label for porn movies." "They could only be seen by people looking for pornography." "An art house movie labeled X lost all of its public potential." "The movie was rated X and that caused us many problems with the distribution." "It was a kind of censorship to be labeled like that." "When people reject the movie," "I don't think it's because of the zoophilia." "I think it's shot with lots of discretion." "I think it's the second half with the coprophagy scenes that disturbs the viewers." "Amongst my favourite directors there was Pasolini." "There are influences and connections between Teorema and Vase de noces." "I consider Teorema as pure poetry and after seeing it for the first time, I said to myself that it was the kind of cinema I would love to do." "A movie where the narrative line is only a pretext to develop much more than just a simple story." "People think that there's a connection between Pigpen and Vase de noces." "I don't see a direct connection." "Pigpen was released the same year as Vase de noces and when we saw it, we had already finished our movie." "There wasn't a direct influence but it's nice to see that a director that I loved as much like Pasolini also decided to work with pigs." "However, Pasolini used the pigs in a political and symbolical way while the sow in Vase de noces didn't have this image of evil, sin, dirtiness." "It was just a symbol of the feminine element of the world." "When we made Vase de noces we did it in the context of experimental cinema that had something very intangible, like every art of the stage." "It was an event that was shown at festivals and in some "temples" of experimental cinema." "And then it disappeared." "I hoped that this particular audience of experimental movies could lead the movie into the theaters." "We received a small fund from the Belgian Department of Culture to blow the movie up to 35mm." "It was something we really wanted to do." "So there was a bet that would open the door for a bigger distribution." "The bet had a price, and that price was a 35mm print." "So we made that bet." "We had some hope at the beginning but the biggest surprise was to see that we somehow won this bet because the movie was seen by a much larger audience than the small experimental cinema one." "This movie had a distribution in 15 countries." "It has been shown at many festivals and it was always a surprise for us to see that what we did with a very small budget was part of a big international circuit, even without being really part of it." "That could have only been a temporary trend but we are surprised to see that 35 years later the movie keeps on being seen at festivals, museums and now with DVDs it can have a new life all over the world." "We were naive and didn't even know if it was possible to print the movie because we used a very particular film reel." "We never thought to live such an adventure with the movie going to so many festivals and meeting so many other filmmakers who I was very pleased to meet." "35 years later, I still can't believe it's true." "That's good..."