This was the first acting experience for all the youths that play in this movie.
In reference to the sex scenes, Fien Troch said: "We decided quite late in the shooting that these scenes would be explicit. My intention was not to shock. But it would have been strange to film everything but the sexuality. It would have felt like the camera was hiding. The most difficult thing was to talk about it with the actors. What vocabulary to use? In the end, after discussing it with a thousand precautions, they were keen to try to get rid of the problem. I told them that if they were not comfortable, we would stop. The incestuous scene between John and his mother was possible because my two interpreters, Mistral Guidotti and Els Deceukelier, knew each other well. They came to the shoot together. Everyone felt comfortable. Intimacy is not necessarily where you think it is on a set. For example, the actor who plays Sammy, Loïc Bellemans, sometimes has anxiety attacks. I asked him to simulate this in the film and he admitted that it was the most difficult scene for him to do in the film. He never thought he could expose himself like that in front of someone, while next to that he had a masturbation scene! But it was less personally."