The drama surrounding Xavier Dolan’s film “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan” has all but been forgotten since the film’s debut at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. After the mostly negative reviews, people ultimately forgot that there was a two-year period of behind-the-scenes turmoil that had film fans on the edge of their seat, wondering what the hell the filmmaker was cooking up.
And according to a new interview with Globe and Mail, what he originally put together wasn’t just a film but a 4+ hour epic drama.
READ MORE: Xavier Dolan’s ‘The Death and Life of John F. Donovan’ [TIFF Review]
“I shot the film that I wrote, but the film that I wrote was a 160-page script that made no choices,” he said. “You now want to focus on something [the editing process] that I’ve been focusing on for two years and I don’t know how inspired I can be to talk about that. I usually edit movies in two months, not two years. It was at times brutal and invigorating to rediscover something you think you know by heart.”
The report says that the original cut of ‘John F. Donovan’ clocked in at an astonishing four-and-a-half hours, and featured a lengthy prologue about the origins of Rainer Maria Rilke’s book “Letters to a Young Poet,” which was filmed in Prague and featured narration by Michael Gambon.
READ MORE: Xavier Dolan’s ‘Matthias Et Maxime’ Sparks A Magnetic Love Story [Cannes Review]
For those that haven’t seen the film yet, and unless you were at one of the festival screenings, odds are you haven’t, “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan” tells the story of a young boy that develops a pen pal relationship with a closeted TV actor. The film features an all-star cast and was supposed to be Dolan’s big breakout film. Obviously, with the damning reviews, that never came to pass.
But, even still, the filmmaker revealed that while he never had a pen pal relationship with famous actors growing up, he did send letters to some, including his all-time favorite Leonardo DiCaprio. Why DiCaprio? Well, Dolan explained that “Titanic” had an incredible impact on his life and career path.
“‘Titanic’ is not just the film I loved as a child, it’s the beginning of many things,” he admitted. “Probably a sexual awakening, but also a cultural awakening, a cinematic awakening and a life awakening in that I realized how ambitious the film was. It inspired me to consider all the options I had artistically – that I could act, design clothes, even shoot films. None of these options had ever seemed possible before.”
It’s unclear if those in the US will be able to watch ‘John F. Donovan,’ but those in Canada will be able to catch Dolan’s film, as it arrives in theaters on August 23.