Xavier Dolan on fame, film and finding inspiration in unrequited love

Actor-auteur, enfant terrible, golden boy — Quebec filmmaker Xavier Dolan has earned a lot of labels in the decade since his debut I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère) put him in the spotlight.

In those 10 years, he has directed eight films and his latest, Matthias & Maxime, opened in Canada on Oct. 9.

Dolan, 30, spoke with Montreal comedians Thomas Leblanc and Tranna Wintour for a special episode of their CBC podcast, Chosen Family.

Below is an excerpt from that interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.  

Painful love as inspiration

I find easy stories boring on screen. I feel like a movie is always about a problem, so something has to be wrong — something has to be hard to get.

Then that also transfers to my personal life.

It's true that I've always been attracted to people who are not necessarily interested in me — even if they were queer, they were in a relationship, or lived abroad.

Maybe I'm the one who's not comfortable with ambiguity, because I've been living with ambiguity my entire life. Not my own ambiguity, but I've been with heterosexual men my entire 20s.

They were ambiguous. And they were trying to be gay, but not necessarily able to.

Is having your work labelled 'queer' limiting?

I don't really care. I'm queer. As a kid, I never saw queer people [in film], never.

And then eventually, when I got older, there were movies where suddenly I could see male contact, and male sex. But these were also very bleak stories about suicide, about bullying.

They were always tragic stories. I could never really see myself represented.

So maybe for a part of my life, I struggled with my life and works being categorized as "queer." But I certainly don't anymore.

I am queer. And if I tell a love story about two men, I'm just telling a love story. I've seen love stories about men and women my entire life and I've never categorized them as "straight movies."

I might make movies about homosexual people for the rest of my life. They'll still be stories, and movies, and that's just that's just the way it is.

Being happy in wanting

I'm looking for romance.

I'm not looking for stability, and relationships, and settling down.

I'm looking for mad passionate love where we'll chase each other, and then it won't work, and I will be stranded in an airport listening to Everything by Lifehouse.

There's nothing greater than writing movies when you are heartbroken, or when you are striving to impress someone that you wish loved you.

Conflict, feeling, film

Things are not always easy and soft. You don't always ask permission before you hit someone, before you scream at someone, or before you feel betrayed.

Feelings are feelings. I make movies out of feelings — things that I felt.

The most important thing about these films is not the acting, not the sets, not the light, and not the names of the actors on the sheet.

They're not me and my little stupid ideas of how we can frame something, or play with film. The most important thing for me is feeling.

Chosen Family41:05S2 E9: Hanging By A Moment with Xavier Dolan

In a special episode of Chosen Family — part retrospective, part love letter — Thomas shares personal stories about award-winning Montreal filmmaker Xavier Dolan from throughout the years. Then, the Cannes darling himself opens up in a rare feature interview about love, family and friendship.

How has fame changed you?

It has certainly brought me closer to the people that I really love, and the people who really love me, and who have helped me shape who I am.

People who have helped me get rid of the bullsh-t — of the superfluous friendships or the superfluous traits of my own character — moments in my life where I thought it was cool to hate everything and hate on everything.

I've gotten rid of that.

Confidence in the work, not the self

I've been told "No" so many times. When I was handing out my first script people would say, "This is not good. You have to go back to school. This is sh-t."

So there were hardships along the way — which is good, and which is normal, I guess.

But I knew what I wanted to do. And I knew I wanted to be an actor and director.

And anyone standing in my way was the hurdle that I needed to circumvent and go around because, I had to survive and just do my thing.

I have confidence, perhaps not in myself, but in my ideas and in what I want to do.