Cineaste:
Why are there so many silences and so little dialog in your films?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne:
In fact, The Son is a film about the difficulty of speaking…. We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters’ bodies and what gestures a character makes—how he passes a cup to someone else, how he pours coffee into his cup. This is more interesting than presenting actions as pretexts for talking. Words come afterwards, when you cannot do anything else. In general I think there is too much talking in movies; it is an easy thing to do. But why clutter up a film with chattering?