In a recent interview for Flemish weekly Focus Knack, acclaimed German film director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (who won this year’s Oscar for the best foreign film for Das Leben Der Anderen) professes his love for the work of Belgian comic writer Jean Van Hamme. He says :
“The really great artists, like Picasso, Hemingway and Friedrich Von Schiller, were no pretentious snobs. The same goes for Jean Van Hamme by the way.
I mean it. I am an enormous fan of that Belgian comic author. Thorgal, Largo Winch, XIII, The Joker, I read almost all his stuff. There aren’t that many script writers on his level. It would be a great challenge to adapt his stories for film.
On second thought,the plot to XIII, for example, is so intricate that I couldn’t possibly cram it all in just one film. Besides, history proves it : of most comic books that a film was made of, the majority sucked.”
An English edition of XIII was recently published by Dabel Brothers.
(The picture above was taken from La Tribune De Bruxelles, which recently profiled Van Hamme as a “Very Important Brusseleir“)
