februari-juni - KVS

34
interview / eng
Not ALL RAyMoNdS
ARE tHE SAME
ThoMas GUnZiG anD ManU Riche on The PRePaRaTions FoR Raymond
– SéBAStIEN HENdRICKX
© Danny Willems
It was the documentary filmmaker Manu Riche who
had the idea of doing something on the subject of the
legendary football trainer Raymond Goethals (1921-
2004). Raymond was originally a film project. ‘I had a
sort of Belgian-style biopic in mind,’ says Riche. ‘Not
a grand mythological story as in Hollywood, but a
quest for the little idiosyncrasies of this exceptional
man.’ Raymond ultimately took the form of a stage
monologue written by Thomas Gunzig rather than a
film. French-speaking Belgium has already known
him for several years as a writer, columnist and frequent
guest on radio and television programmes.
Since he moved from Le Soir to De Standaard as the
permanent home for his columns, he has been well
on the way to becoming a familiar public voice in
Flanders too. We spoke to Manu Riche and Thomas
Gunzig on the basis of the provisional script for the
Raymond monologue.
Manu, what attracted you to
Raymond Goethals?
M: Like many people from Limburg, in the area
where I grew up, I was always a big fan of the Standard
football club. I was 18 in 1982, when, under
Goethals, the team once again became the Belgian
champions. It came as a tremendous shock when,
two years later, it turned out that the decisive match,
against Waterschei, actually the neighbouring borough
to where I lived, had been fixed. After that
Goethals was banned from ever again being a trainer
in Belgian football. He moved to Bordeaux and Marseille,
where he achieved his greatest successes.
That victory, the corruption affair and the ban that
followed all came to occupy an important place in
my personal mythology. And also, Goethals was a
living legend on both sides of the language border.
He merrily mixed French and Dutch together in his
vivid Brussels dialect. He is the symbol of the Belgium
I grew up in and which is now about to disappear,
or in fact already has disappeared as a result
of successive state reforms.
Your documentaries are often portraits of
people in leadership positions, such as the
boss of antwerp’s harbour, Fernand huts,
and the socialist leader steve stevaert. Do
individuals underlie historical developments
or are they rather the products of them?
M: My films are not so much psychological character
sketches as sociological portraits. What is the
context in which a particular individual functions
and what dialogue does he enter into with that context?
In the past I have in this way looked into the
worlds of politics, economics and music, and now of
sport too. No, I don’t think individuals can really turn
events in a particular direction, it is more that they
are themselves directed. That also applies to the
leaders in my films. They often cherish the illusion
that they have control over things, and that it is they
who will decide. There’s something tragic about this
that particularly fascinates me. When you start from
the angle of the person in power, you get a much better
view of the ambivalent mechanism of power than
if you started out from the person in a subordinate
position or, even more so, the victim. In those cases
you see above all injustice and suffering, the effects
of power.
Thomas, in the monologue you are writing,
are you distancing yourself a little from
Manu’s original documentary intentions? Your
fictional character, Raymond, is only loosely
based on Goethals’ life. how did that choice
come about?
T: Limitations can be extremely stimulating for a
writer. That’s why I like working on commission, so
as to do something on a specific subject that has
been presented to me. When I received a telephone
call from the KVS this summer, asking me whether I
would write a monologue about Raymond Goethals, I
immediately made it clear that I liked sport, but that
football didn’t particularly appeal to me. I don’t actually
know much about it. I felt the only way I could
react to the request was to distance myself from the
‘real’ Goethals and invent something completely new.
What were your starting points
for writing the play?
T: I was keen to start from a turning point, looking
for what underlay the myth. Not that of Goethals,
but of ‘my’ Raymond. What made him throw himself
into life with such energy and become so obsessed
with a specific issue? After all, we are not born as
the people we turn out to be. There is a whole series
of external factors – sociological, historical, personal,
etc. – that shape us as subjects.
Your monologue is put together in an unusual
way. Why did you opt to tell the story of your
character’s development in a non-linear way?
T: I see texts as objects, which a writer can
charge with energy by means of specific interventions.
In Raymond, a number of elements are introduced
in the beginning and are regularly returned
to. As the script progresses, I enrich these elements
with new information. Something which I might have
started subtly at the beginning may later be emphasised
and at the end perhaps be put in a completely
different light. Instead of composing my script in a
linear manner, with the causes coming neatly before
the effects, I opted for a more complex construction,
though in spite of this it is not difficult to understand.
After all, we think and talk like this in our daily lives.
We say something and then come back to it later. By
reformulating something we often see more clearly
what we had previously been trying to say.
Will the ‘real’ Raymond still have a part to play
in the piece as it ultimately turns out?
T: My character does of course still have a number
of characteristics in common with Raymond
Goethals. And it is up to Manu and Josse De Pauw to
put my script to their own use, with complete freedom.
A play is not a fully rounded piece of writing. It
is written to put on stage, to be brought to life by a
director, an actor, a stage designer, etc.
M: I am thinking of reintroducing Goethals into
the play using film. Not so much in images as in
sound. I will probably make a montage of the sound
material I found in the archives. It would be nice to
introduce Goethals’ presence in the form of a sound
piece that ‘encircles’ Thomas’ words.
ThoMas GUnZiG
Thomas Gunzig (1970) is currently one of the most
widely-read and versatile French-language writers
in Belgium. In addition to novels, he has also
had short stories, children’s books, radio plays and
stage plays published. His literary work has received
several awards and has been translated into many
languages (though not yet into Dutch, unfortunately).
He also lectures in literature at several colleges and
is also well-known as a chronicler and as a guest on
radio and TV programmes on the Belgian Frenchlanguage
RTBF. Recently he started writing columns
for De Standaard. His work is characterised by great
imagination and black humour.
ManU Riche
The documentary-maker Manu Riche (1964) was one
of the first people to work on the RTBF cinéma vérité
magazine Strip-Tease. In the 90s he produced several
independent documentaries in coproduction
with European public broadcasters. In early 2000 he
examined the relationship between fiction and reality
in two films on Belgian icons: King Baudouin and
Georges Simenon. Riche conceived, produced and
directed the series of documentaries entitled Hoge
Bomen (VRT & RTBF), which were exceptional portraits
of people in power. He is currently putting the
finishing touches to his latest documentary, Snake
dance, and is engaged in the pre-production stages
of the fiction film Problemski Hotel.
raYmonD
p. 06
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