Director Hopes to Cast Wider Net in U.S.

Belgian director Pierre-Paul Renders hopes his first feature, “Thomas in Love,” an amusing cyber-romance about a 32-year-old shut-in who meets women over his “visiophone,” makes a connection with increasingly wired American audiences.

Told solely through the video-screen communication of the unseen, agoraphobic title character who hasn’t left his apartment in eight years, the film satirizes everything from cyber-sex and matchmaking agencies to Internet shopping and online therapy.

The offbeat picture, set in a close-at-hand future in which every need can be satisfied at a keystroke, has won a handful of festival awards, including best first feature at Venice, and has been sold to distributors in 17 countries, ranging from Japan to Brazil, rare for a small Belgian film.

“The Internet is more [prevalent] in the way of life in America,” Renders, 38, said over lunch at a Santa Monica restaurant, “so maybe the young continent is more prepared for this movie.” When Renders’ friend, screenwriter Philippe Blasband (“An Affair of Love”), first showed him the script five years ago, it was written as a vision of the future 20 years away.

By the time “Thomas in Love” was completed, the concepts of such things as grocery shopping from home, meeting potential marriage partners online, and a cyber-suit for online sex (now being designed) seemed uncannily prescient, Renders said.

The idea of people communicating through video telephones may be a science-fiction cliche, but Renders said he loved the idea of telling a story solely through the monitor of the main character, so the audience sees only what Thomas sees, as if watching the archives of Thomas’ hard drive.

“Normally, you go to the movies and you know that the movie is made for you, it has been shot for you,” said the director. With “Thomas in Love,” “you are like a voyeur. At first, maybe you ask, ‘Have I the right to look at this?”’

Amid the proliferation of Web cams and unscripted television shows all over the world, it bothers Renders that today’s audiences “just turn on the television and we watch without critical distance, and to me that’s a danger,” he said.

Originally, Renders and Blasband thought their project was so bizarre they would never be able to find funding for it and planned to shoot it just on weekends with friends, but it never worked out. Another friend of Renders, producer Diana Elbaum, saw the script and she persuaded them to shoot it properly as a feature and raised the money in France and Belgium.

The film was made for well under $1 million and shot in 24 days on digital video. The filmmakers offered financial participation to the actors and crew, many of whom were friends--including Blasband’s wife, Aylin Yay, who plays Thomas’ love interest, the melancholy government cyber-prostitute Eva.

Unable to afford studio space, they filmed in an old vacant public school building whose classrooms were transformed into the apartments and workspaces of the characters with whom Thomas interfaces, including his mother, therapist, insurance agent and various customer service representatives.

The actors worked in an environment closely resembling that of their characters, left alone or with only a gaffer in a room with a camera and a monitor set up to see the one character the audience can’t, Thomas. Benoit Verhaert, who as Thomas is only heard in the film, was set up in his own small soundproof room, with only a table, chair, bed and the camera equipment.

During shooting, Renders and the actors spoke over headsets and watched one another on an ironically primitive piece of television equipment--a TelePrompTer, which was altered to carry a video feed and behind which the camera could be hidden, so the actors could speak directly to the image. What may have seemed isolating at first actually enhanced the actors’ performances, he said.

“It was like being in a bubble or cocoon of intimacy with the actors that you never get in a normal shooting situation, where there is always the crew or people around,” Renders said. The eye-popping opening sequence, in which a buxom computer-animated “sextoon” named Clara has simulated sex with the off-screen, cyber-suited Thomas, was a bit too intimate for the MPAA, which rated the film NC-17.

IFC Films opted to surrender the rating and release the film unrated.

Renders expected as much in the United States, but when the film was restricted to those 16 and older in Belgium--though approved for all audiences in neighboring France--it provoked an outcry from some people who felt the film should be seen by teenagers, since they spend the most time online.

“What shocked me is that it seems that you get more problems with the sex or the violence in a movie when you try to make people reflect on it than when you just use it as an ingredient [for entertainment],” Renders said.

“My movie is not there to say, ‘Everybody on the Net! Cyber-sex is fabulous!’ That’s not the message of my movie, it’s the opposite. Maybe soon you will have this on your screen, and what will you do with that?”

Renders says he himself only spends about 10 hours a week online, mostly for e-mail and work. Born in Brussels and raised in the Belgian countryside, Renders studied ancient languages in college before attending film school in Louvain, where he met Blasband. There, the two, along with several other students, including “An Affair of Love” director Frederic Fonteyne, came together to produce an anthology film, “Les Septs Peches Capitaux” (The Seven Deadly Sins).

Renders is the fourth in the group to go on to make his first feature. After a number of short films and some television work, Renders’ interest in humanitarian projects led him to shoot several documentaries for the international relief organization Doctors Without Borders, including “Sommeil Trompeur” --about the efforts against trypanosomiasis, or African sleeping sickness--shot on location in Angola. Renders, who now lives in Brussels with his wife Anid, a 3-year-old daughter and a newborn son, would like to continue to balance documentary and fiction work.

“I think it feeds the fiction to be in contact with real life and people who have real problems,” he said. “We live in so comfortable a world that maybe we are losing contact with real life.”

His next planned project, “La Colline du Serpent” (Snake Hill), also based on a script by Blasband, is no less unusual, or ostensibly uncommercial, than “Thomas in Love.” It spans five centuries in the fictional history of two neighboring villages in western Asia, one that practices a religion close to Christianity and the other a religion close to Islam.

“It’s like a love story, not between two people but between two communities,” Renders said. “It’s speaking about the myths of cultural identity and the oral tradition.” Not to mention it will be shot in an invented language--with subtitles, of course.

As for “Thomas in Love,” Renders hopes his difficult-to-categorize film will find an audience in the United States, but he knows it’s a challenge. Despite good reviews, wide press coverage and an attractive marketing campaign, box office for the film was disappointing in Belgium, and a wide summer release in France flopped.

“I’m used to saying that I’ve done a famous movie that nobody has seen, and that’s better than a movie that everybody has seen but forgotten,” Renders said.

Without a French star like Nathalie Baye or an award at Cannes, he said, Belgians aren’t interested in their own films.

“The system doesn’t [help] the movies that need word of mouth,” said Renders, who just as well could be describing the American cinema.

“You have to be good the first week, otherwise you are off the screens, and that’s the problem of all independent movies.”

He cites “Memento” and “Being John Malkovich” as the kind of unconventional films he loves and aspires to make. “I’m longing for more of these films, and I think the audience is ready.”

In “Thomas in Love,” Thomas uses media to isolate himself from the world around him, but it is also through the technology that he finds love and perhaps the path to a cure. So does Renders believe advances in technology are bringing people closer together or isolating them further?

“It depends on the way you use it,” he said. “New technology is not good or bad, it’s just a tool. I think it’s not useful to say that a new tool is a danger, because it exists and nobody will erase it. We have to think about how to use it the best way.”