Xavier Dolan has addressed his six-year filmmaking hiatus saying he is no longer interested in the frenetic pace of his early career and that a recently announced movie will mark a second chapter in his work.
The Canadian director and actor made eight films between the ages of 19 and 29, including 2014 Cannes Jury Prize winner Mommy, but has not made a feature since 2019 drama Matthias & Maxime, working instead on music video Adele: Easy On Me, and miniseries The Night Logan Woke Up.
Dolan, 35, said in a masterclass at France‘s classic cinema-focused Lumière Festival over the weekend that multiple factors had played their part in his stepping away from feature films.
“As I change, age, grow-up, evolve, I like to have time to think, reflect,” he said. “I’m not interested in a formula where I keep adding films, which must all be a bit better than the last. I can’t keep starting from zero each time. I need to build something and have a sense that I’m advancing.”
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“I can’t make a film because someone asks me to. I need to viscerally, truly feel the desire, then have the idea, and then be able to follow it through to the end.”
Dolan revealed over the summer that he had completed a script for a period movie set in 1880s France. However, having originally suggested it was a horror film in an interview with Canadian cinema podcast Sans Filtre, Dolan downplayed the horror angle in the masterclass.
“It’s going to be a genre film, that’s for sure. Is it going to be a horror movie? I might have spoken too soon. There’s a lot of comic elements in the writing. There will certainly be horror moments, but it’s rather an amalgam of lots of genres,” he said.
Dolan said he hoped to shoot the film next year, saying it would mark the beginning of a new phase in his career.
“It will be the second chapter, the second half of a career where I slowed down to the point of nearly stopping,” he said. “I know I could never sustain the same rhythm that I had before. I was younger and I was different.”
Beyond lack of energy and inspiration, Dolan said current world events had also impacted his drive to make films.
“During my first years at Cannes, people would say to me, ‘Aren’t you a bit alarmist?’ I always found that stupid, because I get up in the morning and I read. I want to understand what world we’re in,” he said.
“Sometimes cinema becomes a bit secondary. It’s difficult, impossible in fact, for me, to ignore what is happening in Gaza, and what’s going on in Lebanon, or to deny that we live in a weakened, debilitated environment. These things distract me from my small artistic endeavors.”
Another obstacle has been the challenge of financing films amid rising production costs and falling resources. Dolan suggested Quebec’s existence within the predominantly Anglo-American culture of North America also contributed to this.
“Quebec is an island, a nation. It’s place that survives culturally in tandem, with a world, a country which doesn’t really resemble it,” said Dolan.
“Culturally, it’s very complicated for me to make a film that gives pleasure to North Americans,” said Dolan.
He suggested his 2016 drama It’s Only The End Of The World about the toxic dynamics of a family in which two brothers, who love one another deeply, have become estranged, had not worked with Anglo-Saxon audiences.
“It’s a film of inconceivable violence. They perceive this as negative. I perceive it as something essential about people being incapable of communicating. People shout, express themselves badly, are violent, but they’re people who are hurt, who need to be heard.”
As well as the masterclass, Dolan is at the Lumière Film Festival for a special screening of Mommy. The invite has been sparked by the publication of photo book A Friendship Through Film, gathering images of the film’s shoot as well as prize-winning trip to Cannes in 2014, shot by photographer and longtime friend Shayne Laverdière.
The director acknowledged that strong friendships were intrinsic to his storytelling and his private life.
“It’s not something that comes naturally to me to talk about because I’m living it. Friendship is my entire existence. All the big love stories that I’ve lived have been big loving friendships,” he said.
“Love has always been complicated for me. I was madly in love, but it wasn’t reciprocated and since then, the big love stories in my life are friendship stories.”
This in turn had fed into his creative process, he added, citing the example of Matthias & Maxime, in which he plays a fragile man with strong feelings for a childhood friend.
“I may seem selfish, but I had experienced some failures, or at least, less happy situations, or triumphant stories… Matthias & Maxime was a film of reconstruction, of healing,” he said. “I surrounded myself with my best friends. There was a sense of protection, in being in that gang of friends, with this character who is fragile, but never defeated.”
The Lumière festival – spearheaded by double-hatted Cannes boss Thierry Frémaux, who is also director of Lyon’s Institut Lumière, runs from September 12 to 20.
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