4/30/2023 0 Comments John f donovan![]() Matthias & Maxime premiered at Cannes this past spring with the filmmaker returning to his roots: filming in French in his native Montreal with a crew of long-time friends. He’ll do anything to fight for that and who’s to say that’s wrong?”Īnd so, while the fate of Death and Life hung in the balance, Dolan made another movie. Speaking allegorically about Death and Life and Dolan, Newton says: “This movie sets up a question: Is this man allowed to live? He sacrifices so much, but his career means everything to him. “Xavier feels a need to make a movie in order to satisfy a problem in his own reality, so he creates an alternative reality in order to work through.” “He’s a powerful individual who is driven, passionate and single-minded, in that he really lives his life in the pieces that he makes,” she says in a separate interview. Thandie Newton, who plays a journalist who serves as the movie’s framing device, says Dolan simply lives to work. None of these options had ever seemed possible before.” It inspired me to consider all the options I had artistically - that I could act, design clothes, even shoot films. ![]() Probably a sexual awakening, but also a cultural awakening, a cinematic awakening and a life awakening in that I realized how ambitious the film was. “ Titanic is not just the film I loved as a child, it’s the beginning of many things. “No, but I’m assuming everyone around me did just by the amount of times I would mention his name in one sentence!” he says, laughing. Leonardo DiCaprio was probably one of my first loves.”ĭid he already know he was gay by that point? “Growing up, my room was just posters and posters of Titanic. ![]() It was at times brutal and invigorating to rediscover something you think you know by heart.”Ĭhanging the subject, I ask Dolan if he ever had a “John F. I usually edit movies in two months, not two years. “You now want to focus on something that I’ve been focusing on for two years and I don’t know how inspired I can be to talk about that. “I shot the film that I wrote, but the film that I wrote was a 160-page script that made no choices,” he says. Sitting on the couch, Dolan admits his film has problems. Finally, it screened at TIFF in 2018 to a “meh”-ish, 17 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was then slated to play at Cannes again in 2018 and was pulled by Dolan from the lineup. The film was speculated to premiere at Cannes in 2017, but spent the next two years stuck in postproduction turmoil as Dolan worked with a co-editor for the first time, Quebecois filmmaker Mathieu Denis. It is based on Dolan’s experience growing up as an isolated child actor in Quebec, when he wrote letters to everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Céline Dion. (An original cut, then four-and-a-half hours long, had a prologue about the original genesis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, filmed in Prague and narrated by Michael Gambon.)Ĭo-written with his friend Jacob Tierney, the sweeping melodrama about a lonely child actor (Tremblay) who develops an unlikely pen pal in a famous closeted TV star (Harington) tackles everything from gay identity to white privilege to childhood dreams in an often egregious fashion, thanks to the martyrdom of the movie’s titular privileged and painfully bland hunk. His $35-million English-language debut boasted an all-star cast which included Natalie Portman, Kathy Bates, Jacob Tremblay, Kit Harington, and Jessica Chastain, the latter famously cut out of the movie owing to “tonal issues.” The follow-up to his Cannes Grand Prix-award winning It’s Only the End of the World, Death and Life was Dolan’s Magnolia, a star-studded ensemble film that was a hugely ambitious, yet painfully sincere artistic failure. 23, is now largely considered Dolan’s worst movie to date. There’s no way for me to know what will happen to this film.”ĭeath and Life, which opens in Canadian theatres on Aug. The American market has always been one that I felt really didn’t respond to the stories I want to share, so I have no expectations at all. “Not all of my films have been equally successful and there have been failures, either in convincing a community of journalists, or the public. “I haven’t really lived failure, but I’ve felt how failures feel,” said the Quebecois auteur during a press junket at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018 for his seventh movie in nine years, The Death and Life of John F. ![]() Log In Create Free Accountĭressed in Louis Vuitton, sitting on a couch in a hotel room with an ensuite bidet, 29-year-old Xavier Dolan wanted to assure me that he isn’t afraid of failure.
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