Just over a year after announcing he was retiring from filmmaking, Xavier Dolan has confirmed he is working on a new feature project, which he hopes to shoot next year.
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The Québécois director was speaking at a masterclass at the Lumiere Film Festival, a fest organized by Cannes chief Thierry Fremaux, in Lyon. Dolan will be hosting a special 10 th anniversary screening of his Cannes Jury Prize winner “Mommy” at Lyon’s 2,000-seat auditorium.
He says the script is written and is hoping to shoot it next year. Dolan explained the film won’t be quite a horror movie but there are “certainly horrific aspects or moments,” as well as a “lot of comic elements” in the writing. “It’s going to be an amalgam of several genres.” He also revealed the story “takes place in 1895 in the world of the elite, the Parisian literary world and in the countryside too.”
Often dubbed the Québécois wonder kid, Dolan directed eight feature films in a decade. However, he hasn’t directed a film since 2019 drama “Matthias & Maxime,” though he did make the Canadian drama series “The Night Logan Woke Up,” which was aired in 2022. Last year, he stunned fans after announcing on Instagram that his “current state of mind and the state of the world don’t inspire me to pursue what was once an inevitable vocation.”
Questioned about this hiatus, the 35-year old director said he feels he has entered a second chapter in his career.
“I get up in the morning, I read, I want to understand the world we live in, and sometimes cinema becomes secondary in this world. Cinema is a way of escaping this world, but it’s hard to ignore what’s happening in Gaza, in Lebanon, impossible for me to deny our fragile environment, to deny that everything I see takes my focus off my small artistic gesture,” he told the Lyon crowd, searching carefully for the right words in his trademark intense style.
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“If I’ve waited this long to make another film it’s because I no longer had the desire or the energy, and I knew that there’s no point if you’re doing it without this passion, this strength,” he explained.
Asked what he would do differently in his career given the chance, the famously demanding director responded enigmatically: “There are certain choices that are difficult to talk about because it would be indecent to reveal…,” he hesitated, before resuming: “I might have wished that certain collaborations had led to more generosity, or inventiveness, but things are what they are, and you have to come to terms with certain decisions that have had an impact on the depth, or lack of depth, of certain films,” he said, leaving the crowd wondering who he was referring too.
On the role of friendship, a recurrent theme in his films, Dolan replied: “All my life, my existence is about friendship, all my love affairs are great friendships. Love is complicated for me; I’ve been madly in love without it being reciprocal. The greatest love stories in my life are friendships, so it’s natural that this shows up in my films. I made “Matthias and Maxime” because I’ve experienced failures. It was a healing film, a film where I surrounded myself with my best friends,” he said, referring to the box-office disaster of “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.”
Dolan is in Lyon for the launch of his new book, “A Friendship Through Film,” to mark the 10 th anniversary of “Mommy.” The book features hundreds of never-before-seen photographs from the shoot to its journey to Cannes captured by long-time friend and collaborator Shayne Laverdière.
The Lumière Film Festival runs in Lyon from October 12 to October 20.
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