Xavier Dolan: Mommy’s boy

Wunderkind filmmaker Xavier Dolan is finally beginning to open up.

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Cinema’s child prodigy is slowing down, at least from his own frenetic pace. And he’s not sure he likes it. For the first time, Xavier Dolan, the 25-year-old French-Canadian ­director-and-everything-else, has spent time talking about and promoting his latest film rather than shooting off quickly to his next ­project. Almost a year after Mommy had its ­acclaimed premiere at the Cannes film festival last May, Dolan hasn’t moved on.

Normally he would be shooting his next film by the time he premieres his latest movie, so he is new to the process of talking to journalists, ­attending screenings and meeting the public.

He admits it is “sort of very refreshing to meet new people and talk” about Mommy ­although he concedes, with a laugh, “it’s beginning to be a little tiresome”.

He explains that by the time he premieres a film at a festival for the first time, he already has seen it “75 times”.

“And I do everything in the films,” he says. “I involve myself in everything, in every department. I do the costumes myself, I do the poster, I do the DVD, I do the press kit for the journalists because I want it to look good and reflect what I really have in my mind.”

Mommy is Dolan’s fifth feature in five years and perhaps his most acclaimed and most ­consequential offering.

The Montreal auteur made his directorial debut in 2009 as a 20-year-old with the openly autobiographical I Killed My Mother.

He has since been an art-house fixture with films including Heartbeats, Laurence Anyways and Tom at the Farm.

But Mommy is a step again; he shared the last year’s Cannes jury prize with Jean-Luc Godard, the 83-year-old French legend, and the film has since swept the French and Canadian national film awards with the best foreign film in Paris and nine Canadian Screen Awards, including best film.

Mommy is an intense portrayal of the ­relationship between a compulsive teen, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), and his tough single mother, Diane (Anne Dorval), who homeschools her dangerous son. The film is intense because the duo dominates the film with their anger, joy and sorrow, at once beautiful and ­annoying.

Dolan’s flashy and sometimes experimental visual style is intensified in this film by his ­decision to shoot it in the 1:1 aspect ratio — ­essentially the square box.

Which is one of the reasons Dolan is a little tired of talking about the film. Perhaps it is true most film writers and critics read too much into many films; as often as not necessity, not theory, is the mother of movie invention.

Dolan laughs. “That’s true,” he says. “I think a lot of journalists are shooting their own film when they’re watching one.

“All the people are asking me why we shot in the square and some of the theories are just so cerebral about the reason I did it, saying it’s to illustrate how suffocating their life is and how stifling. And I’m just like: ‘No! It’s to be close to them!’ ”

He adds that, “from a little more darkish or nerdish point of view”, that ratio is the one used for a portrait style in photography.

“I wanted Mommy to be very character ­driven so it just seemed like the potent ratio for me and my story,” he says.

“I wanted to be close to that, emotionally speaking, and avoid all the distraction you get of right and left of frame. So, there’s nothing more to it.”

It is a particularly bracing visual construction, though. Certainly this writer struggled to adapt in the first reel.

Dolan shrugs off the idea it was a bold move. Many have asked whether he was afraid going down that particular path; he counters he couldn’t be afraid if he didn’t consider it forced or a particular device.

“It was just so simple to do it and set it, and for the rest of the film that would be our aspect ratio and, yes, there would be one scene where we would ‘break free’ from that ratio,” he says.

It is a striking, if perhaps predictable, ­moment when protagonist Steve “opens” the frame. “He opens up the frame, the ratio, ­himself, with his hands and suddenly everything breathes, and he breathes and his life breathes because he feels free, he feels happy. It’s as ­simple as that.”

Dolan’s youth allows him such unfettered creative decisions. The wonder boy is such ­because he doesn’t feel the need to second-guess himself. Although that in itself is a criticism of his work from older critics. His youthful candour and screen indulgences paint him as a poster boy for the narcissistic selfie generation.

Mommy is the latest example.

Steve’s reckless behaviour is allowed, largely, to bloom and Dolan frames it so closely, often in Steve’s face, it can feel like a two-hour-plus ­selfie.

And that requires some incredible lead ­performances to hold the film together. Dolan knew the two lead females — Dorval and Suzanne Clement — but had to mould Pilon because he’s so young. “My passion is to direct actors and each of them found their character in a different way,” Dolan says.

He’s rapturous about his two women, noting Dorval is “so far from this woman” yet was able to find a true character.

“That’s the greatest virtue of an actor for me is they have so much imagination, they’re so creative, and that is so precious,” he says. “What we could imagine and create together had so many ideas, some had to be left aside, but at least we had the choice, lots of choices, because they are so creative.

“That’s what I like from an actor, not only someone who thinks and feels but someone who tries and explores and then can say, ‘I was wrong but I wanted to try that new thing’.”

Yet the screenplay was heavily scripted, despite its freewheeling, natural feel. Dolan says he improvises a lot during the scenes.

“I will call new lines, I can’t ever shut up!” he says, laughing. “The feed is ongoing and I will hear a line and, well, that new line seems opportune, so I just call it out.

“I love doing that because I think it just breaks the plan and brings us to a more organic, spontaneous place. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

His respect for his actors is genuine because he is talking about them. He notes later: “I, at least, don’t make films to talk about them.”

When it is suggested he has been so prolific because he throws himself into so many different aspects of a film that he wants to be free of it once it premieres, he disagrees. “I don’t want to be free of these films but all of the aftermath is so expansive and exhausting and exhaustive, it’s just consuming,” he says.

Nevertheless, he has learned post-Mommy that people ask questions about his film he didn’t ask himself.

“You start realising ... ‘Oh, that’s why I did that, and that’s why I did this, that’s what that means’,” he says. “They (teach) you a lot by asking you questions.”

Talking about a movie for nine months, he says, is not in his nature. But when you’re 25 and have made the five films Dolan has made, one’s work speaks for itself.

Mommy is open nationally.