The Skin We Live In

Five years ago, when he was just 18, Xavier Dolan heard an awesome story. “Someone in a car told me her boyfriend took her to dinner, for his birthday, and came out in front of her as a woman,” he recounts. “That was the exact moment that I knew that I was going to write about that story.”

For some 18-year-olds, it would've been a fanciful daydream. But Dolan was, at that point, beginning work on his debut feature, a semi-autobiographical, memoirish picture called How I Killed My Mother. It premiered at Cannes when Dolan was only 20, introducing the French-Canadian filmmaker as a prodigious new world cinema talent. After following it with 2010's Heartbeats (a melancholy black comedy about the fantasy-projection of a harbouring a crush), Dolan returned back to that old yarn.

“I wanted to make a decade-long love story,” says Dolan. “I wanted to make it epic. Make it legendary. Make it last through time, with a lot of different characters, different colours, different seasons, different cities, different movement, different music, different periods, different clothing, different hairstyles, different clothes. That's what I wanted to do: to have it be this big thing.”

And big it turned out being: Laurence Anyways, his Melvil Poupaud-starring story of a transgender journey and the semi-tragic love-story that goes with and rolls out for almost three hours. “I knew how it would end, and I knew how it would begin,” Dolan offers. “The unsolved variable, in all those years in the interim, would be what would happen; how you would get there and how you could talk about love in all its grandeur.”

Setting Laurence Anyways through the late-'80s and early-'90s, Dolan started out, stylistically, by raiding his mother's photo albums (“ripping off pictures of my mother's friends in the '90s; how they would dress, what they would look like”), then spent two months of pre-production researching obsessively. “From 7am to 2am, every day, every week, for two months. Locations, costumes, doing rehearsals, listening to records, building decors, sets, buying fabrics, looking for furniture, looking for schools, looking for streets that could be period.”

Though not foregrounded as much as in Heartbeats (whose title was likely inspired by its recurring use of The Knife), soundtrack choices are again a strong, recurring feature of Laurence Anyways. “Every music piece I use in a movie is destined to reflect what a character is going through, but also to reach out to the audience, and fuse their own private moments, their own intimacy, to the movie's own emotions, and nostalgia. Music is a tool we use not only for the story, but, when we share the movie with the world, music is the only department, the only artistic element, that keeps writing the story of the film when the music is over. Because it keeps making this contact with the audience.”

With three very personal, very queer films to his name, Dolan has, at 23, already cultivated quite the intense following. “I really want to share that connection with audiences; I feel like if people understand my movie, they might understand me,” he says. “And they should. Because my movies are very personal, and pretty intimate. If someone carefully watches one of my films, they should probably know me as much as my mother does.”