Scenario, storyboard, continuity script or novel? Mr Nobody is a bit of all. The first book of Jaco Van Dormael, it is the story of the film that he will shoot next year, in English, distributed internationally.
Mr Nobody develops the themes that are at the heart of Jaco Van Dormael’s work. Born in 1972, Nemo Nobody is convinced he is 36 yet he wakes up in 2092, an old man. 120 years old, Nobody is thus the oldest man and the last mortal of a humanity were no-one dies anymore. This does not seem to interest or even trouble him much. His only question is whether he led the right life; whether he was a loving companion to the woman he was meant to love, and had the children he was meant to have. He wants to be sure his was not any of the other possible existences, with any of the other possible women. As a little boy, on the train station’s platform, he once had to choose between his mother or his father as his parents were separating. Nobody is still unsure whether he took the right decision. The film’s premise is based on this essential uncertainty. We follow Nemo Nobody through his adventures, lived or dreamt, to discover, in the last pages of the book, a little girl standing next to a pond: the little girl he never stopped loving.
Filmmaker and scenario writer, Jaco Van Dormael was born in 1957 in Brussels, Belgium. He is the author of two films, Toto le héros (César for best foreign film and Caméra d'or in Cannes in 1991) and Le Huitième jour (joint best actor award in Cannes in 1996) and is, together with the Dardenne brothers, the leading filmmaker of his country, Belgium.