Xavier Dolan selects his 10 favourite films
Feeling uneasy about the state of your career? Look away now. Currently in his 30s, former child star, Louis Vuitton model and award-winning filmmaker Xavier Dolan had already directed six successful movies by the age of 27, sharing the Jury Prize with Jean-Luc Godard at the 2014 Cannes film festival for his film Mommy. Here, the divisive Hollywood prodigy selects his ten favourite movies.
Dolan stepped into acting at the age of four when his aunt Julie, a production manager, encouraged his mother to send him off for a TV drama audition. By the age of eight, he was a bonafide child star, appearing in a series of commercials for a drugstore chain in his native Québec. “People would recognise me and pinch my cheeks,” he told The Guardian. “Can’t say I hated it.”
During high school, he avoided drama troupes like the plague. The stage was a place for people comfortable with vulnerability. TV, on the other hand, was ideal for people looking for a place to hide. After a string of failed auditions for shows looking to cast rebellious, melancholic teens, Dolan found work dubbing Hollywood movies into French (he was the voice of Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter movies), which must have felt rather ignoble considering his penchant for classic French cinema.
Sitting down with Criterion in 2010, Dolan selected an array of new wave gems, the first of which was Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot La Fou, which was released in 1965 and follows a disillusioned man and his mistress as they undertake a crime spree through France. “The ultimate freedom,” Dolan said of the scintillating romantic drama. “Freedom of words, freedom of images, freedom of colours, and freedom of love. This is Godard at the acme of his art, the apex of his craft. A cinema that never denies itself anything.”
Love is a recurring theme in Dolan’s top ten. He describes René Clément’s Forbidden Games, released in 1952, as one of his “top three love stories” before explaining: “Narciso Yepes’s legendary score gives this juvenile romance its fame and contributes to its magic, but the movie is an entity of perfection,” he said. The artistic direction is meticulous and inspired; there’s a vanguard oneiric look to the film. “Brigitte Fossey delivers an endearing and incredibly mature performance and looks the epitome of femininity despite her—gulp—six years of age.”
Dolan is even more fascinated by françois truffaut’s The 400 Blows – widely regarded as one of the finest French movies of the post-war years. “The first time I fell in love. And felt loved in return,” he said of the 1959 film. “Basically, my childhood (with nuances, of course)—I’m sure I am not the only one who was wondering where in my house they had hidden the cameras. Léaud at the top of his game; he did create, with time, his own acting rules, his own school in his mind, and he opened the doors to many other actors and actresses.”
You can check out Dolan’s full selection below.
Xavier Dolan’s 10 favourite films:
- Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
- Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)
- Forbidden Games (René Clément, 1952
- The 400 Blows (François Truffaut,1960)
- Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1998)
- The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
- Au revoir les enfants (Louis Malle, 1987)
- Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
- Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1988)
- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)