Xavier Dolan's Matthias & Maxime is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries starting on August 28, 2020.
NOTEBOOK: Matthias & Maxime feels like such a layered and nuanced work. What’s the main thing you want viewers to take away from the film?
XAVIER DOLAN: I think the main thing that I’d love to know someone’s taken away from this is the sense of friendship, actually—towards my characters and towards the viewer’s own friends. This movie was always a love declaration to my friends, so, to me, it just makes sense that one would think of theirs while watching it, and just want to cherish them, and miss them. It might sound silly but I think it would be enough for me. And maybe also to know that it started, amongst men, maybe, a conversation about what it means to be masculine, what it means to worry that you might be less masculine all of a sudden because you feel certain things… how this masculinity can be toxic. Because this is undeniably what the movie fundamentally is about.
NOTEBOOK: How do you see Matthias & Maxime as an evolution of your directorial style?
DOLAN: I always explore and re-explore certain themes and places from film to film. So in this one, I’ve carried a lot of things through that I had already explored in previous work. Like unrequited love, or even just the subject of difference, of being different… the people who fit, the people who don’t fit in society. And, well, even if it’s not at the core of the film I guess mothers, sons. Mothers, for me, are great characters and extremely rich material, narratively-speaking, and are figures that have always inspired me. They keep coming back in every movie not because I want to repeat myself, but simply because I don’t feel they’re a theme: I feel that they’re just part of life. Your parents, your family, it’s just fundamental. Anyway, from a technical standpoint, on the more formal side of things, our approach with every artist who was involved in this: I guess we just wanted to tone everything down. André Turpin, the cinematographer, and Colombe Raby, the production designer who I’ve worked with since the very beginning—well not the very beginning, but for years—I guess it was just really important for us to feel a certain change and have an approach that was more down to earth, and just more pastel in our palette… These are two words that feel really stupid in my mouth right now, but yeah, a more pastel palette. [laughs]
And yeah to just feel that things would be more simple and realistic, I guess, than curating a whole world where you have all of the tapestry and all of the curtains and everything’s dark and everything’s dim and everything’s beautiful, and it has to be pretty, and it has to be perfect. We just wanted to reacquaint ourselves with the notion that certain things are nice left either untouched or in their raw state. So all the camerawork is essentially handheld. Everything is handheld because we wanted to follow every character in their movement always and just have a sort of human feel to the motion and be really energetic and accompany every character in a way that we’d feel like another human being watching them.
NOTEBOOK: Even though the characters are nearing their 30s, this still manages to feel like a coming-of-age story. Are there themes in it that resonate with your own experience?
DOLAN: All of the themes in Matt & Max resonate with me. But to say that all the themes resonate with me, I don’t feel that I necessarily have had to have lived them all out or experienced them exhaustively. There are themes that I can relate to even if I haven’t been in that kind of dynamic with a best friend, like the dynamic of that of Matt and Max. Even if I haven’t experienced group friendships until very late in my 20s—as opposed to my character’s whom we present as being longtime friends or even childhood best friends—but I’ve never felt that I’ve had to live something extensively in order to be able to represent it on-screen.
NOTEBOOK: What made you want to step back in front of the camera as Maxime?
DOLAN: I wanted to be a part of the film’s cast because, well… I missed acting. [laughs] Maxime is just the type of character that I’ll play in my own films. If I look at all the characters that I’ve played in my movies I wouldn’t cast myself as Matt, because he’s just so overly-confident, he’s successful and he’s tall and he’s wearing suits, and I would never take myself seriously in a part like that. I prefer the shy guys. I’ll do anything anyone asks me if I’m only in front of the camera, but in my own work I’m shy guys always. Shy guys club.
NOTEBOOK: We’d love to hear about the music selections. Jean-Michel Blais created the original soundtrack for the film, and was honored with the Cannes Soundtrack Award last year. How did you collaborate with him on it? And what can you say about Britney Spears’s “Work B**ch”?
DOLAN: I asked Jean-Michel to score the film, and he said yes, and then we met and listened to music: the music he loved and the music I love. The next time we met, he sat behind the piano and he improvised in front of me. I was right by his side, and at a certain point I would lightly touch his shoulder if we needed to speed things up or slow things down, and he would just understand that language. Because I couldn’t speak, that’s what I mean! Because we were recording, so the room would have recorded my voice. I think it worked well for us, we understood each other and it was very instinctive. it was very different from everything I had known before. I’ve had great experiences scoring music, but I knew it had to be different because I wanted a different film, because I wanted to get away from myself and I wanted to try something new. So it had to be someone else, it had to be someone new.
As for Britney, well, being a longtime fan, of course, it was pretty impressive to be able to have “Work B**ch.” They said no to begin with, but I wrote a letter: I reached out to the manager and explained my scene and my film and the intentions, and then they were amazing. They were very generous. I think that contrast—to feature such big hits like “Work B**ch” next to Jean-Michel’s very discrete and delicate, and aching piano—is the kind of contrast that I’ve always found really rewarding in storytelling. It’s just as big as the contradictions that you’ll find in everyday life, and for me it’s always been about those kinds of contradictions: in sets, and dialogue, and characters. In everything, really.
NOTEBOOK: What did it mean to you to have the film play in competition in Cannes?
DOLAN: Cannes is where I was born as an artist, it’s where everything started for me, so obviously it has a special place in my heart. But it also makes it hard for me to categorize or label as “work” anything that happens there, and to keep a distance—it’s just hard not to make everything that happens there personal. And that’s been of course a problem over time. Because what happens there is that films get made in Cannes, or destroyed—they’re either adored or reviled in a matter of seconds. Which, I guess, is better than films being ignored. They say: don’t let it get to you, but you know… it will get to you, it’s something you’ve made and that you’ve fabricated for a year, or sometimes two or three or four years. People spend ten years making films sometimes. So when it’s taken away from you in a matter of seconds and it belongs to everybody else, something special happens there, and it can hurt a lot.
But a lot of beautiful things have happened, mostly beautiful things have happened there, and for me Cannes remains a place of discovery, self-discovery, and discovery of other artists. A place of laughter, and encounters with incredible artists that I wouldn’t have ever dreamed of meeting, or to call my friends, even.I think that in fact, and in part because of the festival, and thanks to the festival and everything that’s happened there, I’ve come to terms with the notion that a film has to be good or bad, or impressive, or has to command admiration and respect—really, I think now that I want to make movies that matter to certain people for a certain reason, and that’s it. That’s more than enough for me. Not because I’m lazy and I don’t want to evolve, of course I want to evolve, I want to grow, I want to be a better artist. But you can feel that sometimes in very small details in your work. And if I feel that I’ve achieved that sort of evolution and progress in even the smallest of ways then, what I mean is that the feeling of validation will come from the feeling that people connected with my work and what I did.
NOTEBOOK: Tell us about the dynamic between the ensemble cast.
DOLAN: Well to be fair we already had chemistry from the get-go, because we’re best friends in life. We’re not those friends, those characters, but we are friends. And we’ve been friends for a long time. A lot of our inside jokes and a lot of who we are landed in that film. I insisted that we would build and write characters and we wouldn’t be ourselves, but still, a lot of who we are and the spirit of who we are permeated and ended up in the film. The spirit of that group and their humor and their tenderness for each other is very much close to reality.
NOTEBOOK: Which filmmakers do you admire?
DOLAN: I have a lot of admiration for Paul Thomas Anderson, I love his world. I find his worlds very appealing, his films can be very different from one another but—well, there’s no “but,” I actually find that to command admiration and respect. I love when people do different things and surprise us, and he always surprises me and takes me on this incredible journey and vision, and I find that very attractive. I would live in that world, his worlds. And then Claude Sautet. I admire Claude Sautet a lot. I love all his films, but I also love the fact that he co-existed—or did he?—with all of the great auteurs and directors from Nouvelle Vague. He wasn’t… I don’t think he was very appreciated or acknowledged until much later. But he had nothing to offer that was as flamboyant or “smart” as the likes of Truffaut and Godard. But his movies were just so incredibly sensitive and intelligent and sincere, and they were flamboyant in their own way, and had their aesthetic qualities… and were formally impressive, but weren’t about being impressive, and about the artform. They were just about the storytelling, and the characters. And I think they should be admired.
NOTEBOOK: You’re a MUBI subscriber! Which films did we help you discover?
DOLAN: Yeah, I first subscribed to MUBI when I was 17. It was 17, I had just moved into my first apartment and it was called The Auteurs then. And it was everything I had never had, and references that seemed really dreamy and sort of distant from all the films that I had seen growing up. I’m pretty sure, actually I know that I discovered Apitchatpong’s work on MUBI, Tropical Malady—I’m sure I watched that on MUBI. Uncle Boonmee… and so many others. I remember when I watched, when I discovered Tropical Malady I was just discovering a whole other way of telling stories. Not that it was so different from everything I had seen or known, but it was just so singularly unique and subtle and mystical and stressed, for the first time ever for me, the importance of having style, and having soul, and doing things your way, which is the only way I guess.
NOTEBOOK: What’s next for you? We’d love to hear about any upcoming projects you’re working on.
DOLAN: I’m working on a miniseries, I’ve adapted a play from here, from playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, who had written Tom at the Farm, another play of his that I adapted a couple years back. The new one, the miniseries, is a story of rape, taking place in the 90s and nowadays. We travel back and forth from past to present, which promises to be fun. It’s a story of grief, a story about family, about death, how you re-explore your past, how you reacquaint yourself with estranged family members. It feels like familiar ground for me, but it also isn’t: it’s entirely different, being a thriller in genre. It’s really an opportunity for me to explore thriller, which I’ve been meaning to do for years. I’m also adapting a French horror short story that takes place in the late 1800s, so again, very different in genre.