Tina Kakadelis
Those who have played tennis know that there is a distinct loneliness to the sport. It’s often just you, your opponent, and your brain fighting against each other to come out on top. As physical as the sport is, it’s mental too. Leonardo Van Dijl’s Julie Keeps Quiet is one of the few tennis-centric films that truly understands the brutal isolation of the sport. The movie centers on Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck), a teenage tennis player whose ex-coach is under fire for improper conduct. Julie is now in the middle of a conflict much larger than herself and must decide if she will stay quiet or speak out about her experience.
Ahead of Julie Keeps Quiet‘s theatrical release on March 28, director Leonardo Van Dijl sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss his love of tennis, the weight of silence, and the importance of safe sets for all. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Every one of your short films, and now Julie Keeps Quiet, has some sport element to them. Do you play sports? What makes sports such an interesting topic for you to keep returning to?
Leonardo Van Dijl: It doesn’t come from a background of being in sports. I mean, I played tennis on a little league level, but that’s about it. I would also never really say that, in terms of performance and true grit, I resemble an athlete, yet I have much admiration for it. I also like to be in that world because, for me, they’re interesting personalities to analyze.
What I also think is great is that I like to tell stories about politics. Rather than telling them in institutional settings, I like to bring the subjects home to where they are affecting our daily lives. In that way, sports is more a metaphor for society because it’s a community. Everything that’s happening in this community matters. In this story, for example, we all understand very early on what the stakes are. What are the power dynamics between her and her peers? Her and her coach?Those are things you don’t have to really explain.
At the same time, what’s fantastic about sports is that it’s just a beautiful world to be in. We can talk about these important topics while also giving the eye those nice, visual esthetics of the tennis courts. We can play with sound, play with music, and play with choreography. There’s so much fun in telling stories within the world of sports.
How long have you played tennis?
I’ve played it all my life, but when I started studying film, I had to stop because I moved to a city and I didn’t have a car anymore. All the tennis clubs were outside the city.
Only after I finished the first draft of Julie did I give myself permission to start playing tennis again. I knew that if I would have done it before, it would just have been a way of procrastination. Call it doing research (laughs). I often make the joke that the reason I make movies is to pay my tennis coach.
I must say, the tennis community is really fun and they pop up everywhere. It was a great choice to tell this story within the world of tennis because I received so much support. I think that’s really cool because the subject of the movie tackles something that shouldn’t be controversial, but it’s seen that way sometimes. My aim is to say let’s focus on new narratives, let’s focus on the safeguarding of young athletes.
From the early beginning, the tennis community was there. This is something they want to be part of. That resulted even in, for example, Naomi Osaka becoming an executive producer on the film. Even in the early days when I was just doing research for the movie, I had the support of my own tennis coaches and my own tennis club. For all kinds of practical reasons, it was good to do this film in the world of sports, but then if you have to choose a sport, the tennis world really helped me instead of trying to silence me.
You also directed Umpire back in 2015, which is also about tennis. Are there bits of Umpire that made its way to Julie Keeps Quiet?
Umpire was a film I made as a student, and I actually prefer not to talk too much about it, because I really want Julie Keeps Quiet to stand out as a singular movie that has a singular arc. I don’t even like to talk too much about myself and my own background because I want this movie to be centered on Julie. I want to talk about her silence, all the reasons she keeps quiet, and how we as a community can be there to create a world in which she will be safer. A world where Julie will be safe, an entire generation of boys and girls will be safe. That’s what really deeply matters to me.
When we go back in time, then sometimes it becomes more about me and who I am as director. Maybe one day it will be time to talk about that, but now, how I always see it, is I made one singular work, and that is Julie Keeps Quiet. I did that by putting all my skills as director into the service of that character. Always thinking about what’s the best for Julie. How can we tell this story about a girl who didn’t choose to be in the center of everything because of her silence? How can I tell this story? How can we create an interesting movie that’s challenging certain burdens that come with this subject?
So about Julie. Tessa Van den Broeck is a phenomenal actor. This is her first role, right? She’s primarily a tennis player.
She is a tennis player. All the kids in the movie are real tennis players, and they’re all between the ages of 14 and 17. It was just the easy way out to cast real tennis players. There was not another way of doing it. I had the luck that Challengers came out and everyone wanted to know if they were real tennis players. For me, I had to get real tennis players because it’s impossible for somebody to learn how to play tennis in six months.
If you find somebody like Tessa, who has the gift of acting, you can fine tune that within six months. So that’s what I did. I think Tessa walked in on the second day of the auditions and it was clear she could be the perfect Julie. I wanted to work with somebody who approached the acting in a more technical way. The great thing about Tess is that she’s almost like a very British actor. She sees the fun in playing and fooling around in that way and lying. She likes to deceive, I would say. We often had sad scenes, and the moment I said cut, she was the first one to make a joke or say something like, oh, you really believe that?
For me, that was nice because it was very important to me. When I say let’s create a safe world, it starts with creating a safe set for teenagers. I felt like Tessa had the strength to do it. After the premiere at Cannes, somebody asked her, how was it to see yourself on the big screen for the first time? She was like, well, the first ten minutes was kind of awkward, but then I just saw a character, and I was watching what Julie was going through. I was so in awe of that, because that’s such an amazing quote. It’s like how to say you’re an amazing actress without saying you’re an amazing actress. That’s like Frances McDormand, you know? Tessa is at that level of acting. I was so blessed that we could work with her and that she gave volumes of loudness to that silent girl.
What does a safe, open set look like for you?
It’s about safeguarding. For me, it’s about creating an open dialogue and not only having that dialogue going on on set, but starting it from the day we started casting. It was not avoiding subjects when I went to speak to the coach of Tessa way back, telling him the intentions of my story and asking him, please have faith in me and try to talk about these things with your athletes.
It wasn’t about gaining trust with him or convincing Tessa to do it or to try. It wasn’t this kind of casting where people came in for the lead role. We were, in general, just looking for tennis players. In the second phase, it was about approaching Tessa’s parents, and saying listen, a happy kid walked into the audition and I want that happy kid every day on set. We will have to do this together. You will have to become part of it. I will expect you to also be sometimes present on set. When you come and drop her off, stay around a bit. If that afternoon, you have nothing to do, you are more than welcome to sit with us and watch things on the monitor.
Tessa also had to be okay with that. Teenagers sometimes don’t want their parents on set, but for me, it’s not only about the parents or her sisters or bringing a lot of her friends that she knew since she was a child, that she plays tennis with in daily life, but it’s about ensuring that she’s not alone. This becomes a shared experience because it’s quite an interruption in the life of a teenage girl who’s playing tennis to take her to that set, and at that moment, you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. You don’t know what the exposure is going to be or how this will put pressure on somebody who just walked into an audition with the idea, wouldn’t it be fun to see the behind-the-scenes of how we make a movie? Not with the idea that now I’m going to be the protagonist in it.
There’s the scene where Julie meets her former coach, Jeremy, which is quite an intense scene. It was just Julie and Jeremy. There were no extras or tennis players or anyone. It was just a two-actors kind of set-up. I asked Pierre [Gervais], who plays Backie the new coach, to come also to the set, and I told Tessa to also bring two or three friends so she would have company in between takes and someone she could joke around with and play some card games with.
For me, that was super important. Tessa still refers to it as the most fun day because it was super easy. She only had to sit in the chair and listen. We only had to shoot one scene that day, so there was no pressure. That scene is the most intense, most transgressive, most violent scene in the movie. For Tessa, it’s the most fun day. Those are the little things that really matter.
When we went to the premiere at Cannes, everybody from the club who was in the movie could come with her. You really make the film a joint venture and you have open communication. I always say that a healthy dialogue is about three, not about two. It’s about creating the space for people to think about stuff. I never gave Tessa the role. I asked her to consider the role and offered her the experience of trying it out. You can accept the role, but if she didn’t like it, that’s no problem because then we would work with somebody else. I don’t want to work with somebody who’s not feeling comfortable with this responsibility.
It’s not about saying that in the beginning. It’s more like, you will have time to think about this. It’s not about saying, I need an answer now. Always anticipating what’s ahead in that way and creating new dynamics and new dialogues. For example, I said to production, I said, I will never travel alone with Tessa to any kind of event or premiere or festival. She travels with her family or she travels with somebody from production.
It’s just, I know I’m in a position of power. I am a director and I know these kinds of power dynamics are still present, even though me and Tessa never had a conflict. I could also say to production that’s the reason why there are no conflicts. You have to do the extra work now. People sometimes like to go for the easy option, but it was really like a demand for me. It’s a constant process, constantly checking in.
I did so much research about safe job practices and safeguarding young athletes. I could really take those rules and apply to them how this relationship would be between me and Tessa. What was great about it is that creating safe environments is not only there to protect actors, it also is there to protect me because I feel at ease. That makes me a better director. It’s a holistic concept. It’s there to protect an athlete, but also to protect the coach. It’s there to protect an actor, but also to protect the director.
I thought it was very interesting, and I think more powerful, that we don’t know the extent of what happened between Julie and Jeremy. It really adds so much to the film. Was there ever a time when the script spelled out explicitly what the relationship between the two of them was?
No, it was never there. Some people say, for example, I don’t show abuse in my movie, and I say, it’s not true. I show enough. It says more about what you think or consider to be abuse than what I show or not show. For me, it was never about wanting to censor things out. It’s really about how can I show just enough to set up the dynamics, but also don’t give in to these cliches where disclosure is the so-called answer. What I really wanted to do is to focus on the structures that enable silence and portray the institutional complicity rather than just an individual triumph of a victim.
I wanted to really go into how power circulates in that sport system and make Julie’s experience one that counts for all. I wanted her silence to speak for much more silence than only hers, because I know that we all carry silence within us. We all struggle with silence, and then we all come to the same question: what are we going to do? Are we going to break the silence? Are we going to speak or are we going to keep quiet? And what do we have to win in speaking up and what we are losing?
I wanted to bring it to that level of Shakespeare in a way. It’s to be or not to be, to speak or not to speak. I just felt that, in focusing on what really happens, I would reduce the story. We talk about abuse, and sometimes there’s that idea that it happens in isolation, but it’s not true. Often it happens in plain sight and we, as a community, were there, and we didn’t see it.
