After eight films and a series, he bows out. At only 34 years old, Quebec director Xavier Dolan has announced that he is retiring from cinema for good. “I am tired and discouraged (…) I give up cinema and directing,” he explained in a long interview with the Spanish daily El Pais.
“I end up wondering if my cinema is not bad,” explains the filmmaker, tired of the failure of his latest achievement, the series The Night Where Laurier Gaudreault Woke Up. This story, contained in five episodes (a fairly short format), has only been broadcast in four countries. With the exception of Canada, France, Japan and Spain, no foreign chain has decided to buy it. “Why didn’t anyone else buy it? Because it is shot in French, because it only has five episodes?” he wonders, still in the columns of El País.
In the end, this job as show runner cost him more than it brought him back. “I have not won anything with the series. I invested my salary in the production and my father had to lend me money,” he says. This bad experience totally discouraged him: “I no longer have the desire or the strength to commit to a project for two years and hardly see anyone. I put too much passion into it to get so much disappointment out of it.”
The career of the young Quebecer, very prolific, had however started on the street hats. Xavier Dolan began his career at just 19 years old with a first noticed film, I killed my mother. He was then awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes for Mommy in 2014, before receiving the Grand Prize for Just the End of the World two years later.
After twenty years of working as a director, he plans to change medium and focus on advertising. “The simplest solution is to make advertisements and build me a house in the countryside,” he says. After Just the end of the world, just the end of cinema.