Xavier Dolan is a damn good filmmaker. He’s also a bit of an unpredictable personality. It’s difficult to nail down just where his head is at when it comes to his work. Sometimes, he’s really excited about the prospect of filming something new. Other times, he’s talking about how he wants to retire and hates the work. Right now, it seems he’s somewhere in between, but Dolan has some idea what’s next.
Speaking with i-D, Xavier Dolan updated everyone with what he is and isn’t working on nowadays. Though it’s been a while since the release of his most recent film, “Matthias & Maxime,” it appears the filmmaker is ready to jump back into filmmaking.
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Recently, he led the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury, and that reinvigorated his love of film and his desire to get back to work. In the new interview, Dolan revealed that he’s actually not going to work on TV shows next, as he was previously attached to two such projects. One show he was meant to direct but not write, and that’s not happening. The second show is something he’s writing, and Dolan said he wants to keep working on it, but it won’t be his next project.
What’s next is a period piece that he was previously working on before COVID. It appears his desire to make it happen was revived after his stint on the Cannes jury.
“[At that time,] I had started to think about this project I had shelved right before the pandemic. It’s a genre film set in late 19th century France, but it feels like the most personal story I could tell in my life right now,” said Dolan. “Writing it, I’m avid. I’m really excited. It’s playful and [the dialogue has] a lot of humor; the language that these people of literary society – or Les Lumières – were speaking in at the time. I’m drawing, painting – every shot is already described. I even went to the textile merchant the other day to buy fabric for the costumes.”
He added, “I aim to be shooting this in the summer or fall of 2025, which means it’ll be released in 2026. That would mean that it will have been eight years since the shoot of ‘Matthias & Maxime’ – the span of the first chapter of my career. Eight years of making films, and eight years of not making any. I love that symmetry.”
Unfortunately, as he mentioned, it doesn’t appear that this project will be coming anytime soon. It seems as if we’ll be lucky to get the film in 2026, which does feel like an eternity from now. However, for fans of Dolan’s work, the wait will likely be well worth it.
Dolan is probably best known for his films “I Killed My Mother,” “Mommy,” and “Tom at the Farm.” More recently, he worked on projects such as “The Death & Life of John F. Donovan” and the aforementioned “Matthias & Maxime.”