Less than 10 years after adapting brilliantly Tom at the farmbased on the play by Michel Marc Bouchard, on the big screen, Xavier Dolan surpasses himself this time by transforming The night Laurier Gaudreault woke up, a play by the same playwright, in a series of five one-hour episodes that is available now on Club illico and will be broadcast — in a dubbed version! — on Canal+ in January.
The night Laurier Gaudreault woke up recounts the return of Mireille Larouche (Julie Le Breton), an internationally renowned thanatologist, several years after she had cut ties with her family, with her brothers, Julien (Patrick Hivon), Denis (Éric Bruneau) and Elliot (Xavier Dolan), as well as Julien’s wife, Chantal (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau). Following the last wishes of their mother (Anne Dorval), she came to embalm the body of the deceased.
Very early on, a palpable tension sets in between Mireille and Julien. Thirty years earlier, the teenager (Jasmine Lemée) and her brother (Elijah Patrice) formed an inseparable trio with Laurier Gaudreault (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie). So what happened that famous night when their friend woke up?
“We talk about death, mourning, violence, addictions. It’s very existential and whole humanly and sociologically as a small collection of five episodes. It drained me a little of my desires, of my ideas; I gave everything to this series, and that’s why I’m proud of it, because I think it’s a complete project”, explains the director, met during a round table following a press screening.
Thunderbolt
After the release of Matthias and Maxime (2019), Xavier Dolan “doodled ideas for films”. Then, one evening, he goes to the theater to see The night when Laurier Gaudreault has woken up. He then understands that he has just found his new project and that it will not be a feature film, but a TV series. In 2020, three episodes are already written. Then comes COVID-19…
“The pandemic has allowed me to lay down, write, rewrite. Twenty times on the loom, hand over your work. With Nancy [Grant, productrice de la série], the actors, all the speakers, we all asked ourselves questions, we wondered how best to tell this story. The texts have been revised and reworked. We didn’t want to compromise on quality because we always lack time and money, it’s a universal rule of any shoot, here as elsewhere. »
Created in 2019, at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, in a staging by Serge Denoncourt, the family tragedy of Michel Marc Bouchard was behind closed doors in a embalming room. In the hands of Xavier Dolan, the piece becomes a thriller psychological anxiety, even darker than were Tom at the farm and Just the end of the world, based on the play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, stories of painful returns to the past within a dysfunctional family. With its camera movements that stick to the gestures of the characters and its editing effects where the voice occupies a leading role, the series evokes the universe of David Fincher and the codes of horror cinema.
It’s very existential and whole humanly and sociologically as a small collection of five episodes. It drained me a little of my desires, of my ideas; I gave everything to this series, and that’s why I’m proud of it, because I think it’s a complete project.
“It’s all things that, in my opinion, can coexist. I love film noir, thrillers, and I’ve always dreamed of doing it. I was able to touch that with Tom at the farm. the thriller, it’s the genre for which I really have a natural inclination. These are the movies and series that I like to watch at home. »
Counting among his new collaborators the composers Hans Zimmer and David Fleming, whose soundtrack contributes powerfully to the tense atmosphere, Xavier Dolan has called on two faithful accomplices, Stéphane Lafleur, with whom he signs the editing, and the director of photography André Turpine. Showing an undeniable flair for the choice of costumes, he proves once again that he is as talented as an actor as he is at the direction of actors, each of them offering moments of overwhelming truth.
Apart from an American series that he is developing and which may never be shot, Xavier Dolan affirms that he has no ideas for films or series for the moment: “ The night when Laurier Gaudreault woke upit’s my favorite filming experience, but I feel like I need time to recover, not just to rest, but to re-inspire myself”, he concludes.