Interview: Michaël R. Roskam, writer/director of Bullhead

Belgian filmmaker Michaël R. Roskam’s feature film debut, the 2011 crime drama Bullhead (Image Entertainment/Drafthouse Films, Blu-ray $29.97, DVD $27.97, released June 26, 2012), is a moody, well-crafted crime drama that smoothly navigates the channel between arthouse drama and genre crime flick. Rightfully, it was nominated for a 2012 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of the year.

Bullhead revolves around Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts), a steroid-gobbling young farmer based in the Flemish province of Limburg who gets involved with the “bovine hormone mafia,” a group that uses illegal hormones designed to fatten up cattle. Dealings with the juicers might have been business as usual for Jacky if not for the murder of a police officer and an unexpected run-in with a mysterious aspect of his past. The fateful combination of situations draws him into a storm of dangerous and far-reaching consequences.

Disc Dish caught up with writer/director Roskam to talk about Bullhead, the film’s origins and the filmmaker’s influences.

Disc Dish: Bullhead is your first feature-length film following a handful of well-received shorts. How did this one become your first feature?

Michaël R. Roskam: When I was doing my shorts and was very intrigued by cinema, I always felt very connected to film lore: old crime films, gangster movies and so on. The tragic parts of these stories really worked for me. Especially film noirs, which were always tragedies. While I was making all my shorts, I started to create an idea for a story that I wanted to do. If I wanted to make a noir, I need to have a good crime—something authentic, something from my soil. The hormone mafia is a very serious and very real crime scene. I was convinced when I first heard about it years ago; I always knew I was going to do something with it.

DD: It’ s certainly a unique subject and not one that we hear about a lot in the U.S.

MR: I did a lot of work to learn about the topic. To combine farmers and gangsters was very original from my perspective. My friends agreed that it was a crazy environment and an original idea.

I didn’t want to make a re-construction of the real crime that happened [in 1995] involving a veteran and his assassination. That was just the beginning idea. I wanted a profound story of human nature, inspired by some coincidences and others things that came along in my mind. I wanted it all to connect but not to be a direct story about the crime.

DD: Bullhead has a very well-composed, painterly look to it.

Matthias Schoenaerts is Bullhead.

MR: Because I was raised in a Flemish region, we’ve had a huge tradition of painters over the centuries. I always liked the Flemish artists—they have always been a part of my life.

DD: You’ve spoken of how you and your team referred to Belgian painters and French Painters like Rembrandt when preparing for the film.

MR: I studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. I love painting—light, composition, color—and storytelling, as well. In cinema, it’s also about what you tell in one frame. The frame of a film is its own painting. When I teach [at the St. Lukas Film School in Brussels], I tell young people not to forget to look at the old paintings because they are also about storytelling, movement and the suggestion of movement.

[For Bullhead] I wanted to limit the cuts, to keep an eye on the pace. For that, I kept paintings in my memories. The film is set in West Flanders and Limburg and we have the Flemish light – the clouds – so I was very proud to work within that kind of visual style.

DD: Jacky reminds me a bit of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, particularly with his head butts and what looks like the ability to smash in a wall with his skull.

MR: Raging Bull was an important film for me. I f I was told that I could only carry a couple of films to Mars, one of them would be Raging Bull. But I didn’t create Bullhead as an homage. When I decided to create Jacky and his name Bullhead, I knew the comparisons would be there. But Martin Scorsese was always a huge inspiration for me. So are the Coen Brothers and Orson Welles.