Xavier Dolan

Early life

Dolan was born on 20 March 1989, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is the son of Geneviève Dolan, a Quebecois teacher, and Manuel Tadros, an Egyptian-born Coptic Canadian actor and singer with strong ties to the Quebecois entertainment industry.

Early films

Dolan attracted international attention with his first feature film, I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère), which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in at the age of 20, using funds from his extensive work as a child actor. He reportedly wrote the script when he was 16 years old. He said in an interview with Canadian newspaper Le Soleil that the film was partly autobiographical.

The film was at first financed solely by Dolan, but when need for more money arose, he asked Telefilm and the SODEC for subsidies. Each turned him down for different reasons. SODEC, who had loved the project but refused to finance it because it was submitted to a too commercial department, encouraged Dolan to submit it again in more appropriate "indie" department, which he did. In December 2008, SODEC gave him a $400,000 subsidy. In all, the film cost around $800,000 CAD. Dolan said that the system to acquire funding is "[...] an obsolete financing mechanism that holds the creative assets of Quebec hostage".

The film premiered at the Director's Fortnight program of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it received an eight-minute standing ovation and won three awards: the Art Cinema Award, the SACD Prize for screenplay, and the Prix Regards Jeunes. It also won a Lumière Award and four Jutra Awards, including Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Most Successful Film Outside Québec, beating out Denis Villeneuve's film Polytechnique (2009) in what was a deemed an "upset".

Dolan later admitted the film was "flawed" and Peter Brunette of The Hollywood Reporter called it "a somewhat uneven film that demonstrates a great deal of talent". Brunette also called the film "funny and audacious", while Allan Hunter of Screen International said that it possessed "the sting of shrewdly observed truth".

The film received the Claude Jutra Award (now known as the Canadian Screen Award for Best First Feature) at the Genies, and the Toronto Film Critics Association awarded Dolan the inaugural $5,000 Jay Scott Prize for emerging talent. I Killed My Mother was named one of Canada's Top Ten features of the year by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and chosen as Canada's official entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2010 Academy Awards, though it failed to receive a nomination from the academy. Distribution rights were later sold to more than 20 countries. Due to legal problems experienced by the film's U.S. distributor, Regent Entertainment, it was not released theatrically in the U.S. until 2013, and once released, it earned little at the box office.

The second feature film Dolan directed, Heartbeats (Les Amours imaginaires), was financed privately. The film follows two friends who are infatuated with the same mysterious young man and their friendship suffers. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at the 63e Festival de Cannes in May 2010 where it received a standing ovation. It won the top prize of the Official Competition at the Sydney Film Festival in June and screened at several film festivals throughout 2011, but failed to find audiences in non-French-speaking countries. It received several Genie nominations and the AQCC (Québec association of film critics) for 'Best Film'.

His third film, Laurence Anyways, was selected to compete in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Suzanne Clément's performance in the film won the section's award for Best Actress. The film received praise or qualified praise from critics. A critic for MTV's The Out Take, which focuses on LGBT films, called the film "the best film of the year." Despite the praise, the film was not released commercially for a year. Upon release, the film struggled at the box office, and only grossed roughly $500,000 in Canada.

In May 2012, Dolan announced that his fourth film would be an adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard's play Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme). It received its world premiere in the main competition section at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2013 and won the FIPRESCI award. Though Tom at the Farm played the festival circuits in 2013, it was not released in the U.S. until 2015. In an August 2015 interview, Dolan said: "No one knows me in the States, because the movies have been released in such an awkward, irregular fashion, all by different distributors.... I don't want to sound pretentious, but it's puzzling."

Mommy

Dolan's 2014 film, Mommy, shared the Jury Prize in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival with Jean-Luc Godard's film Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage). The jury president for the 2014 festival was Jane Campion and, upon receiving the award, Dolan stated:

The Piano [Campion's film] was the first film that I watched that truly defined who I am.... It made me want to write films for beautiful women with soul and will and strength. To even stand on the same stage as you [Campion] is extraordinary.

The film was singled out by critics as Dolan's "most mature" film to date and proved to be a breakthrough in his career as a director. It was his first film to achieve significant success at the box office, grossing over $3.5 million domestically in 2014, becoming the highest-selling film in Quebec for 2014. According to the Montreal Gazette, over one million people saw the film in France. Mommy won the Cesar Award for Best Foreign Film in 2015.

It's Only the End of the World

Dolan also adapted the play Juste la fin du Monde by Jean-Luc Lagarce for the screen, titled It's Only the End of the World. The film stars Marion Cotillard, Gaspard Ulliel, Vincent Cassel, Léa Seydoux and Nathalie Baye. Filming commenced in late May 2015. The film was an official selection for the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, in competition for the Palme d'Or, though it did not win.

The film premiered to polarized reactions from festival audiences and critics, with Vanity Fair calling it "the most disappointing film at Cannes." The Hollywood Reporter called it "a cold and deeply unsatisfying" film and Variety dubbed it "a frequently excruciating dramatic experience". During the festival, Dolan spoke out against the negative criticism in the media. Despite this, the film also received positive reviews from critics, including The Guardian, which called it a "brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction".

The film won the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Jury Prize. It was also featured in competition at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2016, and later screened at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. It was released in Quebec and France on 21 September 2016. In France, It's Only the End of the World was released to 391 screens, where it debuted at number one at the box office and sold 1,034,477 tickets.

It was chosen as Canada's submission for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In December 2016, it made the shortlist of nine films under consideration for nomination as Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards, but it was not nominated in January 2017. On 7 December 2016, the film was named to the Toronto International Film Festival's annual Canada's Top 10 list.

AlloCiné, a French cinema website, gave the film an average of 3.3/5, based on a survey of 44 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 44% approval rating based on 32 reviews, with an average score of 5.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It's Only the End of the World is stocked with talent and boasts a story steeped in conflict, but the end result proves a disappointing misfire from writer-director Xavier Dolan." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 48, based on 11 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

For his work on It's Only the End of the World, Dolan won the César Award for Best Director and Best Editing at the 42nd ceremony on 24 February 2017. For his work on the film, Dolan also won 3 Canadian Screen Awards for Best Motion Picture, Best Achievement in Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

Dolan is in pre-production for his first English-language film The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, writing the screenplay with Jacob Tierney. The film follows John F. Donovan (Kit Harington), a Hollywood film actor whose life and career are turned upside-down when a gossip columnist (Jessica Chastain) exposes his private correspondence with an 11-year-old British fan. The film also stars Susan Sarandon as Donovan's mother and Kathy Bates as his manager.

Other work

In 2015, Dolan was selected to serve on the jury for the main competition section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Also that year, he directed the music video for "Hello", the lead single from the album 25 by Adele. The video broke the Vevo record for most views in 24 hours, over 27.7 million views. The video was also notable for featuring footage shot in IMAX. Dolan received the Juno Award for Video of the Year for directing the video.

Influences and style

Dolan has said that he is not particularly influenced by any specific directors, though in 2009, Dolan identified Michael Haneke as one of his favourite directors for his precise camerawork and strong writing, citing Haneke's Funny Games and The Piano Teacher as favourites. At the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Dolan said that The Piano by Jane Campion was a major inspiration for him. He has also cited seeing the film Titanic as an early influence on his decision to enter the film industry. He has mentioned paying tribute to My Own Private Idaho with a sequence in I Killed My Mother and being influenced by the frog rain scene at the end of Magnolia, but said in 2013:

What I’m trying to say is that I’m not that influenced by directors.... I’ve read basically every review of my films because I’m crazy and I focus on what’s negative and I want to know what people think—and why they think it. So many times I’ve been bullied into references and influences that were never mine by viewers that would project their opinions and associations and assumptions on me.... But let’s get real: ideas travel and everything’s been done, it’s all a matter of interpreting things again now.

Personal life

Dolan is gay and described I Killed My Mother as semi-autobiographical.

As director

As actor

As voice actor

Note: Many films that are dubbed in French are also dubbed in the French spoken in Québec or in one of the versions of French known as international French. DVDs may be labelled VQ for "version Québécois", which uses a Québécois accent and terms unique to that variety of the French language, or VFQ for "version francophone québécoise", which presents a generally neutral accent but pronounces English words in a way found in North America rather than in France.

As music video director