Welcome Home

When teenagers Lucas and Bert escape their boring family lives to hit the road and seek adventure, an innocent romp goes awry rather quickly in this feature by Dutch director and screenwriter Philippe de Pierpont. See welcomehome-film.com.

This film starts innocent but turns quite violent. What made you want to tell this story?

I wanted the audience get twisted slowly, without being aware of the slippery tune of the story. So begin as a classical “coming of age” movie about these teenagers’ experiment of life and finish in a kind of a thriller.

I’m sure that real life can easily shift that way. And that sounds good to me: everything is possible, you cannot know in advance the consequences of your acts and choices. Never knowing if an apparently good news is a bad news a posteriori, and the opposite. So, that’s the beauty of life: experiment every day.

There’s another reason to write this: I hope that every human could have a second chance in life. So we can be wrong, we can fool ourselves, and escape from this later, being older, bigger, smarter.

Is there any resemblance to your own childhood or family life growing up?

A part of my inspiration is my own experience as a teenager. I was always with my big brother, with whom I shared strange life experiments for my age.

I had no money and wanted to go in holidays. I decided to go anywhere, stopping for night here and there, without a plan, without money, alone, and sleeping at night in empty houses. I never break or stole something. I just slept in their bed, had a shower in their bathroom, ate the food in their refrigerator, and left everything clean and put back in order. And let a little enigmatic trace of my passage before leaving. A message on the refrigerator’s door, a puppet made from clothes.

There is lots of youth violence in the news these days, especially in America, but that seems to be traveling to other countries as well. Does your film have insight into that frightening phenomena?

My purpose wasn’t to tell about this phenomena. But, in fact, the way the characters of my film are acting, without thinking once at the consequences on the others (their “victims”) looks like an echo of this modern violence, considered mostly as a selfish drift without consideration for the others that it spreads all over.

What is your next film?

I’m preparing a documentary. I’ll shoot it in April 2017. It’s a long-term movie chronicling six ex-homeless children. We already made three films: when they were children, when they were teenagers, at 21 years old, and now — the four survivors are adults. The last film will be a conclusion of their life, when they’ll be old men.