How Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma Brought a Goncourt-Winning Novel to the Screen

Growing up in Marmande in the south-west of France, twin brothers and directing partners Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma longed to run away. “We wanted to escape, [and] making movies was the only escape we had,” says Zoran. “We decided to go to Paris to try and make movies because it was the only thing we thought we could do in life.”

But when making Leurs enfants après eux (And Their Children After Them), their fourth feature together, the Boukherma brothers needed to look back. Based on Nicolas Mathieu’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel of the same name, the film, set in eastern France during the industrial decline of the 1990s, depicts a working-class coming-of-age story very much like their own. It was the brothers’ vision of a sweeping, American-style chronicle of adolescent hope and heartbreak that won them Mathieu’s blessing to adapt his novel for the screen.

Set across four fateful summers, the film follows Anthony (Paul Kircher) as he falls for the wealthy Steph (Angelina Woreth) and endures a violent rivalry with Hacine (Sayyid El Alami), sparked by a house party run-in that turns sour. Over two-and-a-half hours, Leurs enfants après eux explores the emotional chaos of youth and the lived reality of economic deprivation through graceful cinematography, rousing music and heartbreaking performances. 

The day after its premiere at the 81st Venice Film Festival, where it debuted in competition, the twins sat down with Mastermind on the Lido to discuss the film’s depiction of intergenerational violence, creating a “sweaty” visual language, and the power of Bruce Springsteen.

What made you want to adapt Leurs enfants après eux into a film?

Ludovic Boukherma: What’s really strong about the book is it tells a tough reality, but also it’s extremely generous in the way it’s written. That’s why it works. Nicholas Mathieu manages to mix a social analysis that’s very accurate with a sense of nostalgia regarding teenage years. It’s all about realising your place on the social ladder. It’s about Anthony (Kircher) growing up, so it’s a coming-of-age [story], but it’s him realising his place in society through a love story that fails. It’s pretty rough, because it’s about social assignment, and the fact that people don’t really get to change social classes. There’s a sense that you can’t escape, but since it’s happening through a love story, it makes it softer. 

The film interrogates class and racial divides, but no one in the film is depicted as a villain. Why was that important to you?

LB: Anthony and Hacine are two sides of a mirror, but they are the same. They just don’t realise they are the same. Hacine is from a Moroccan background, and he lives in the projects, and Anthony has a house and is from a French background, but the separation between them is artificial. It’s more just circumstances that separates them.

Zoran Boukherma: The true separation is with Stephanie, the female character who’s from a more privileged background and is going to move to Canada to study abroad, because she comes from a better place. They are not from the same world, and they’re not going to have the same chances in life. Hacine and Anthony are going to end up with pretty much the same type of lives.

LB: We didn’t want to take sides, even with Steph. The book and the movie are a depiction of this valley, and of a time, with several characters, and obviously they oppose, they fight and everything, but we wanted to depict it without taking sides. The idea is just to understand every character and understand why they do what they do, and to have empathy for all of them.

Anthony’s father often lashes out violently because he has no other way of expressing his feelings, and we see that repeated in Anthony’s own violence. What interested you about that intergenerational cycle?

ZB: [Anthony and his father] don’t know how to communicate, so they fight. It’s the same even with Anthony and Hacine – because they are teenagers, they don’t really have the words to express their problems, so they just fight.

LB: The thing about violence is you never remember how it began. Violence engenders violence. [In the film] it starts with a bike being stolen, but you could say it started because Anthony tripped Hacine [at a party], but also, Hacine kicked the barbecue over [at the party]. So who started this? Then Hélène [Anthony’s mother] goes to see Malik [Hacine’s father], then Malik burns Hacine’s hand, and that’s why Hacine burns the bike, and that’s why Anthony then threatens him. It’s like an endless cycle.

ZB: Also, the true violence in the film, apart from the violence that’s depicted in the fighting scenes, is the social violence. These kids are going to pretty much have the same type of lives as their parents before them, and they’re going to stay, so it’s kind of paradoxical… It is a tragedy, in a way. But also, there is something sweet about knowing a place, and being from somewhere, and to feel strongly that you are from that place. 

LB: We also come from a poor background, and when we visit our family, of course, if you see them from an outside perspective, you could say maybe they could have more opportunity, that they don’t realise this place is remote and maybe there’s not much perspective. But at the same time, they are happy, and they don’t have bad lives. We grew up there, it’s our family that we never judge. Maybe it’s an urban way to see things that way, to think that to make it in life professionally, you always have to go away. But there’s also many ways in which you can succeed. There’s not just escaping something.

The film is shot beautifully. How did you map out the visual language with your cinematographer, and in particular, capture that feeling of summer, brightness and broad horizons?

LB: We wanted [the film] to have a sense of heat, even if it’s the northeast of France, which is a grey region in real life. We wanted it to be sweaty, moist, sunny and colourful; we didn’t want it to be sad, visually. Of course, there’s a lake in the book, and Nicolas Mathieu got his inspiration from a real town, but there’s no actual lake next to this town, so we decided to go to Les Vosges in the mountains to have a beautiful mountain lake, for the space to really look nice on screen. Because the movie opens there, we wanted it to have a childhood innocence. Then, when Anthony falls in love with Steph, after he first sees her, you discover the town that’s industrial and rough, and it creates a contrast between the two.

ZB: The way we film, I think we are extremely anxious. We like to storyboard, to feel like we know what’s going to happen on the set. And because we grew up with American movies, we wanted to put all these codes of travelling shots, dolly, steadicam – we wanted it to be precise. On the weekends with our director of photography [Augustin Barbaroux], we went on the sets and would just film all the scenes with ourselves as the characters, with our iPhones, to know how things were going to look.

We wanted the film to be beautiful, to be generous. It was the same idea with the use of the music and the emotion. Traditionally, in France, if you film these types of stories, you’re going to shoot them with a handheld camera on the shoulder, so we wanted to be more precise and more American, in a way.

Speaking of America, you have some amazing needle drops with iconic American songs, such as ‘Under the Bridge’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Was it difficult to get the rights?

ZB: We were lucky enough to have great producers who had the money to pay for these songs that were really important for us. Most of them were in the script, but not all of them. The Red Hot Chili Peppers song, it was funny, in the book it’s supposed to be Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ but we couldn’t get the rights to that, because they don’t sell the rights to anyone.

LB: It was the first time we’ve been able to use that much music. It was great to be able to use all these songs, and the challenge was to mix them with the score, and to be able to have the songs and the score work hand-in-hand. With Amaury Chabauty, our composer, we decided to have covers of pop songs made into scores, to have a connection between the two types of music, a bridge between the music. 

Lastly, who is your mastermind? 

LB: [To Zoran] I know who you’re going to say.

ZB: Bruce Springsteen, yeah. We’ve loved him since we were teenagers, we’ve always listened to his music, and I think we wouldn’t have made movies if he hadn’t been there in our lives. It’s this idea of trying to escape from your life, and it’s extremely social as well. He talks to us a lot.  It’s how we would like the movie to feel. We kind of thought of the movie as a Bruce Springsteen song – something that’s kind of dark, there’s love, there’s this violence, but also, overall, it’s beautiful.

Leurs enfants après eux is due to arrive in French cinemas on December 4.