Sister act
Director Jonas Geirnaert reflects on blending emotion and humour for road trip drama How to Kill Your Sister, stepping behind the camera and the fresh perspective of Belgian storytelling that brings a surreal or absurd twist to contemporary storytelling.
During the world premiere of Belgian drama How to Kill Your Sister, director Jonas Geirnaert sat inside the Grand Auditorium Louis Lumière in Cannes at the end of a “long and intense ride” making the six-part series.
Yet despite feeling “extremely nervous” before the screening, held during French television festival Canneseries, he began to relax as the audience started to laugh in the right places and even noticed some with tears in their eyes. Applause at the end capped a “phenomenal” experience for the filmmaker.
“It’s about quite a heavy subject, and at the same time there’s a lot of comedy in there so it’s tricky terrain,” he tells DQ. “If you don’t get both of those right, you could end up with a series that doesn’t feel good, so we were happy that it came across the way we intended.”
Produced by FBO, the Flemish-language series follows the relationship between two estranged sisters, as Anna arrives at Kat’s house after eight years of silence in a car with a coffin mounted on the roof. She then reveals she is terminally ill with cancer and wants Kat to accompany her on a final trip to Spain – a journey that leads Anna to find out why Kat abandoned her after the death of their parents.
Balancing raw emotions with a darkly comedic road trip, the series comes from creators Evelien Broekaert and Pedro Elias, who began developing the scripts three years before Geirnaert joined the project in the autumn of 2022.
They already knew each other through their collaborations at Belgian producer Woestijnvis, and Geirnaert joined How to Kill Your Sister after expressing his interest in furthering his directing career after establishing himself as an actor (Rusty, F*** You Very Much) and writer (De Dag).
“For me, it really came at the best of times, because in hindsight, it was a good idea that I directed a series that was written by someone else instead of my own series, because then you start with material that’s there already, and you can add your own vision to it and your own take on the story,” he says. “It’s easier to direct someone else’s story than just starting from scratch and writing the script yourself and then directing it. So I learned a lot of things during the prep production and the shoot.”
Before filming began, he sought out advice from other Belgian directors he admires, Dries Vos (Professor T) and Gilles Coulier (Cargo) among them. “I bribed them with good food,” he jokes. “I bought them a really nice dinner in a restaurant and then I said in exchange you have to tell me everything you know about directing, and they did. We had a lot of good dinners.”
His acting experience also proved to be an “advantage” when it came to working with the show’s cast, and in particular stars Emma Rotsaert and Marjan De Schutter, who play Anna and Kat respectively.
“It really helps to know how important it is to have a really trusting relationship between the cast and the director, and I did everything I could so that Emma and Marjan could perform in the best possible way and really feel at ease with their characters,” he says. But despite numerous discussions about character and some days spent rehearsing together, Geirnaert credits “gut instinct” for the decisions the cast made about bringing their characters to life on screen.
“As an actor myself, I forgot my lines like two times, three times every hour, and they never did,” he says. “We just never had to cut the scene because someone forgot their lines. They were so well-prepared, so professional, they were so eager to take on these characters, to take on this role. It was an absolute joy to work with them and the rest of the cast.”
With a story told across two timelines – one in the present and flashbacks to Emma and Kat’s shared past – it was the show’s locations that dictated the filming schedule as production moved across France and Spain. Using fictional place names in the story, most of the series was shot in three different ‘camps’ in Andalucia, in southern Spain, with some filming also taking place in the French region of Périgeaux, near Bordeaux.
“Ideally, we would have shot all of the flashbacks first and then the present-day stuff,” says the director. “For production reasons, it would have been impossible to shoot all of the flashbacks in three countries. it would have been too costly in logistics to do it that way, so we were bound to the locations, so we shot past and present in the same locations in the same shooting.”
It also meant that Rotsaert and De Schutter had to wear a variety of wigs depending on which time period they were filming – and as a result of their decision to both shave their heads to play Anna and Kat, for reasons integral to the story.
“We were not going to start with prosthetics [for making the actors appear to be bald]. If you do, it rarely looks really good, and second, that’s another two or three hours in make-up every morning and we didn’t have the time for that,” Geirnaert explains. “So when I proposed to them, ‘Would you be open to the idea of shaving your heads?’ I was worried that they would need to think about it, or maybe it’s not compatible with some work they had to do after that. But within seconds, they both said, ‘Oh, yeah sure.’
“For a lot of actors, these kinds of roles are not the easiest roles, but exactly for that reason, they’re so interesting to take on. It was only in the editing process that I fully realised how well they prepared, how different they perform as their younger selves than in the present. It’s a nuance, but it was so well prepared and so convincing. They really enjoyed playing those roles.”
At one stage, Geirnaert and the production team explored the idea of filming the series on a virtual production stage inside a studio, which would have removed the need to travel across Europe. But the nature of the series – with a numerous interior and exterior shots required of Anna and Kat in their car – complicated matters, and the director’s ambition to make the show as authentic as possible meant they took the decision to head out on location.
All the driving shots with Anna and Kat inside the car were shot as a stunt driver drove the vehicle from a rig mounted on the roof. “That had the huge advantage that we could shoot 360 degrees in the car because there’s no other car towing it on a trailer,” the director says. “And we spent a relatively short time resetting the car if you’re done with the scene or if you’re at the end of the road.
“But every choice has its disadvantages as well because, of course, if you’re not in the studio, you have to deal with the sun, with weather, with cars breaking down, stuff like that. Most shooting days, we were very lucky in that aspect. We had a couple of times the car did break down. But for our series, I would make the same decision [again] to work with the top steer and to do it in real life. Even with all the problems we had, it was a good call.”
When it came to shooting the flashbacks, set eight years earlier in the story, Geirnaert didn’t want to create an obvious difference between the story’s two timelines, preferring to keep them quite close together in a similar way to Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 feature Incendies. How to Kill Your Sister also appears to be stuck in time, thanks to the director’s preference for avoiding as many modern references as possible and using locations that appear not to have changed over the last four decades.
“It had to have that timeless atmosphere, which meant in most scenes, they could be set in the 90s or the 80s,” he says. “Then again, our characters do have cell phones, for example, but we don’t use them unless we have to. So even if it’s put in the present or just eight years ago for the flashbacks, we really wanted to go for some timelessness in the settings. It’s worked out really well.”
Commissioned by Belgium’s Play4 and Streamz, in partnership with Germany’s ZDFneo, How to Kill Your Sister is due to launch locally this summer. Geirnaert wants viewers to be in tears by its conclusion but promises lots of laughs as the sisters set out on their road trip and meet a host of unlikely characters.
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It also stands out as another Belgian series, like Dead End and Beau Sejour, that might tell a familiar story with an absurdist or surrealist twist.
“A lot of Belgian series, they just see a different approach to a story and they tend to go off the beaten path, whether it be visually or the way you tell a story or just the main plot of the story, to tell something that hasn’t been told before or in a way that hasn’t been shown before,” he observes. “We stand out from the rest. Part of the appeal is that we follow our guts. And you have to have producers and networks backing you up. They put a lot of trust in their creators to make the story the way they want to make it and a lot of times that really pays off.”
As for Geirnaert’s next move, he is now returning to writing with De Dag collaborator Julie Mahieu that he put on pause to make How to Kill Your Sister. But he tries not to think too much about any future roles and whether he writes, directs or stars in upcoming projects.
“I have the enormous privilege to work in this amazing playground that’s called television, and I’m just so happy that I can do acting, writing and directing,” he adds. “I like changing between those three and I would be happy to take on another role as an actor, but I really like the screenwriting part as well. I love editing also. It’s just an amazing playground and I hope to keep doing all of that in the next couple of years.”
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Clan: The inspiration behind Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters, this is the story of four sisters who plot to kill their cruel brother-in-law.
Dead End: This crime drama strikes a surrealist tone, following a man who can taste the history of any object he puts into his mouth, and starts to help the police track down a serial killer.
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tagged in: Emma Rotsaert, Evelien Broekaert, FBO, How to Kill Your Sister, Jonas Geirnaert, Marjan De Schutter, Pedro Elias