Fifty-two-year-old Fabrice du Welz is a Belgian film director and screenwriter known for his provocative, genre-bridging works. He began making Super 8 shorts in the 1990s, before moving on to his feature debut, Calvaire in 2004. It premiered at Cannes’ Critics’ Week. His latest creation Maldoror marks the powerful evolution of his socially aware, atmospheric cinema. Du Welz presents his movie as a reckoning with evil, containing a depiction of systemic failure. The film runs in the midnight movies section at Tiff Romania 2025. This interview took place on site in Cluj Napoca, the capital of Transylvania, where the event takes place.

Maldoror is a chilling crime thriller inspired by notorious serial killer Marc Dutroux case. Set in 1995 Charleroi, it centres on fictional investigator Paul Chartier, played by Anthony Bajon. The idealistic gendarme joins Operation Maldoror in order to monitor a dangerous child abuser, Dutroux’s film proxy. Amidst a bureaucratic, hamstrung police investigation, Paul’s obsession deepens, driving him toward moral ambiguity and self‑destruction.

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Lida Bach – It’s wonderful to meet you here at Tiff Romania. In your new film, you go to a very dark place, and a case people instantly recognise: the Marc Dutroux’s murders. How did you first connect to the story? And how was the development process of putting something so intense and personal to the Belgian nation on screen?

Fabrice du Welz – Well, it’s it happened in different stages. I was 22 when it happened in Belgium in ’95. It shocked me just like my fellas and my parents. Everybody was in state of shock. It changed everything in Belgium, just like November 11th [the end of WW1 hostilities, or Remembrance Day]. We always remember where we were at that moment. I was surprised by the paranoia and the agitation in the media, in the population. I was thinking at the time already, it could make for a very strong film. Everybody said, you’re completely nuts. Of course, I didn’t have the experience back then to embrace such a topic. But it always stayed on my mind.

A few years ago, I decided to embrace it because I had found my point-of-view. Paul Chartier, a young gendarme from a terrible background. He wants to be just and honest. So he thinks that becoming a gendarme could be an answer. It was very important for us to have strong knowledge of the case. Based on that, we worked on the fiction, on Paul Chartier’s journey, with two strong thematic arcs: What is evil and what is justice? What can a man or woman do in a society where justice fails? That was the main metaphysical question of the film. And this determined everything.

LB – The actual Dutroux came from middle class. He was not the stereotypical evil underclass person. In the film, the Dutroux character appears as significantly more underclass. Why did you make that social shift?

FdW – I took a lot of liberties. Like picking a Catalan actor for the part. I tried to – based on very solid roots – embrace cinema. My obsession since I’m a kid is Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]. Tobe Hooper’s film is still around.

We discussed a lot with Sergi Lopez, who plays Marcel Dedieu, the character who is inspired by Marc Dutroux. We tried to go in a different direction. We build that world just like a redneck world. Very cinematic. I know I’m dancing through a fire, but I I think there is no problem to that. My concern was never to bear witness to the reality. If it was, I would have made a documentary. I was obsessed with the story for its context, of course, but my main concern is cinema. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a judge. I’m a filmmaker. And that’s why I love to create a paradoxical, mind-fucking character. I wanted to take some steps away from reality.

LB – Given that cinematic distance from reality, how much did you research the case?

FdW – We tried to read everything we could based on the case. You can find a lot of stuff on WikiLeaks. We had the old press covers, we met different persons.

LB – Was it difficult at some point to occupy your yourself with those dark and violent themes?

FdW – Honestly, no. Because it’s one of my obsessions. I’m fascinated by what I could not understand. I’m obsessed with darkness, that’s for sure. I try to dig into the human soul. I try to understand the past, my own identity as Belgian. What is Belgium? What the fuck is that country?

LB – Your film has very noir-ish themes …

FdW – There is a lot of film noir that inspired the film, mostly its moral dilemma. It’s not a comfortable film. Sometimes I’m a bit frustrated because I always wanted to make a popular film. But I understand how uncomfortable Maldoror is. It puts you in a very strange corner of ambivalence.

LB – Was the title inspired by Comte de Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror?

FdW – The original title at the time was, Operation Othello. So there is a literal reference to it. De Lautréamont’s work was a very important book for me when I was a teenager. Just like A Season in Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud. Immediately, it clicked. It has to be “Maldoror” because that’s a reflection of evil. What is evil? Evil could be judicial machinery, it could be the police, the rednecks, the obsession… What is the consequence of evil? How can evil transform?

LB – You worked together with cinematographer Manu Dacosse, known for his work with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani in Amer [2008] and The Strange Colors of Your Body’s Tears [2013]. How was the collaboration?

FdW – With Manu the collaboration is always great. He’s my close friend. We decided on the tenebrism influenced by Caravaggio.

LB – Is there a real life inspiration for Paul Chartier?

FdW – Yes and no. No because all his background is completely fake. But there is a Henri Michaud, and Henri Michaud was the gendarme, who went down into the basement and heard the voices. And he said, shut up, shut up, shut up – three times. One year after, when they discovered the girls, that moment was highly, broadcast in Belgium. Now I’m always asking myself: how can you life with that burden on your shoulders?

LB – How did you find Anthony Bajon for the main role?

FdW – I knew Anthony because I saw him in a film by Cedric Kahn, The Prayer [2018], a few years ago, and was very impressed by him. So he was my first choice for Paul Chartier. He really wanted to make the film. He has a personal connection with the character. It was personal for me, but very personal for him.

LB – His dark counterpart is Sergi Lopez’ Dedieu, based on Dutroux. You mentioned you didn’t think much about the fact that Sergi Lopez is Catalan. Please comment.

FdW – Yes and no again. At first, [Belgian actor] Benoît Poelvoorde was supposed to play Marcel Dedieu. Sergi is a friend, and I always wanted to work with him. He accept to play a minor role in the redneck group. When Benoît left, I said: “do you want the part?”. And he was like: “of course!”. He was much freer than a Belgian actor because he didn’t have that weight of the Dutroux case on his shoulders. He’s very intuitive. He looked a bit like him, but the character is so far away from him.

LB – Contrary to crime thriller conventions, a lot of your scenes are social interactions. Especially given your background in horror and genre film: Why did you make that interesting stylistic decision?

FdW – It’s a balance. There is no excessive violence. Only one scene. But that’s a good one.

LB – A very intense one!

FdW – I insisted to make it that way because it was important to have an idea of what they can do. It was important to have the flavour of how loony those guys are, but in a cinematic way.

LB – What was the inspiration for he scene where the character presses the girl’s face into the corpse?

FdW – In the first earlier version of the script, there was a chase into the river, she was trying to escape. We had that idea with the frozen body, and then the Calippo, a famous ice cream.

LB – How did you create the music score?

FdW – My friend Vincent Cahay did it. We’ve known each each other for 35 years now. He sent me a lot of different tracks. I like to have, a lot of material for the shooting that I use or don’t use. Nico Leunen and Vincent work very well together. They have the same musical background, electronic. We wanted to have a very analogue, music from the 1990s. Also there is the whistling, that was an experiment we decide to keep. I asked Vincent to try and whistle the theme. He send me that, and we were: We need to do that! It’s gonna be Marcel Dedieu’s theme!

LB – Are you a director who’s worried how the audience is gonna react? Especially before its Belgian premiere?

FdW – I want them to react, of course! Well, it was quite divided. My films are always a little critical. I was expecting a lot because I thought it’s much larger than my previous film. I want to reach the audience. I’m not that kind of director who’s happy to be boring. So that was unexpected for me, that it provoked so much reaction – in Belgium, mostly. But I think the subject is still very touchy. I realised that a lot of people are confused about reality and cinema. I just made a work of cinema.

LB – Are yo working on a new project? Or is there something on your mind?

FdW – Of course. Maldoror is the first film of a trilogy, based on the ghosts of Belgium. Now we are on our way to shoot a story about the rubber exploitation in the end of the 19th century in Congo. When the Belgians divided the country and used the Congolese as slaves. It’s gonna be dark as fuck.

LB – And it’s something that hardly anybody talks about.

FdW – That’s why. It’s, completely unknown, even by Belgian. They don’t know how that little country became so rich. It was because of that exploitation during more than two decades. The people don’t know that. Nobody knows. My kids don’t know that.

LB – It’s also not in school. Like, Germany had all those colonies in Africa. You don’t learn anything about it. You have to look for it.

FdW – Yeah. But it’s very interesting! In Congo, the racism history, the butchery of WW1, it’s crazy. So it’s a very exciting project. We are in casting right now and we desperately hope to shoot next year, but it’s logistically very ambitious.

LB – Would you like to say anything about the third part?

FdW – The third part is about the [Belgian] collaboration with the Nazis on the Eastern Front. So that’s very heavy. I’m very much looking forward to those films, really.

LB – Thank so much for the interview and those insights, Fabrice du Welz!

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Fabrice du Welz is pictured at the top of this interview. The other image is a still from Maldoror.