Hospitalized since December 30 after suffering a stroke, filmmaker Jean-Claude Lord died late Saturday evening at the age of 78, his son Jean-Sébastien announced on Facebook.
Posted at 10:40 a.m.
Director, screenwriter, editor and producer, Jean-Claude Lord has shone in both cinema and television since his debut half a century ago. He is part of the history of cinema and television in the country, by signing fifteen films and thirty television series, documentaries, reality shows and TV movies.
Both popular and political, his cinema often had a message to deliver. The director has touched the public of the seventh art through striking and accessible works. “I like topical subjects that can provoke people while entertaining them,” he liked to say. Reality always exceeds fiction. What can we do there? ! »
“His social commitment was at the heart of his work, he liked to disturb, move, provoke and tell stories in his own way. He defined himself, not as an artist, but as a “communicator” who liked to question the values of [la] society in which we live, ”wrote his son Jean-Sébastien, himself a filmmaker, on Facebook.
A demanding and prepared director
As soon as it was announced, the filmmaker’s death sparked reactions from the artistic community.
“I wouldn’t have become the actor I am today if I hadn’t met Jean-Claude Lord,” says Denis Bouchard, who played the role of Lucien Lulu Boivin in Throw and count, whose first season was directed by Jean-Claude Lord. “He revolutionized Quebec television,” he says.
“He worked very quickly. You had to be very well prepared, you didn’t have to learn his texts when you arrived on set. He was very demanding. They knew exactly what he wanted and, above all, he loved the actors, ”explains the actor.
Marc Messier, who played Marc Gagnon in the television series, agrees. “Jean-Claude was extremely prepared, he took part in the text and he knew exactly what he wanted,” he says.
PHOTO PATRICK SANFAÇON, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Director Jean-Claude Lord and actors Marc Messier and Carl Marotte, in 2003
Jean-Claude Lord is at the origin of several acting careers, as Marina Orsini estimates Mr. Messier. “I had several scenes with a character called Suzie Lambert. When I asked him who was going to play the character, he told me he had chosen a girl who was very good and intense. It was Marina Orisini. He took a chance choosing a 17-year-old girl who had no experience. Today we see the actress she has become,” he says.
According to the author of Throw and count Réjean Tremblay, Jean-Claude Lord bequeathed a great openness to popular culture. “We too often tend to despise the people. He never worked for the elites,” he said.
“When I went on the set of Throw and count, he was the boss. I felt like a privileged visitor, because it was his universe. I had a deep respect for his work,” he recalls.
Reactions also poured in on social media.
The director was very critical of authority, employers, cultural and political elites. In his eyes, absolute power always ends up corrupting absolutely. “The most rotten are those who are at the head of the system, of this kind of money empire”, testifies Lord, in the introduction to tell us about love, his cult film broadcast on the Éléphant platform. In this cruel and virulent charge produced in 1976, the director and his screenwriter, a certain Michel Tremblay, denounce the industry of variety artists on television.
The film was very poorly received at the time, before becoming cult decades later. “Never could I have believed that this film would know a new life, had confided the filmmaker, in 2014, to the film critic of The Press, Marc-Andre Lussier. I was so slaughtered when he came out! It wasn’t until five or ten years ago that people started talking to me about it again. […] There are sometimes things from these returns that we did not expect at all! »
The first homosexual couple in Quebec cinema?
Coming from a popular background, Jean-Claude Lord was influenced in his youth by mainstream films with a sociopolitical aspect, such as the musical West Side Story Where Z, from Costa-Gavras. In one of his first films, deliver us from evil, produced in 1966, Lord features a couple of homosexual lovers played by Yvon Deschamps and Guy Godin. Undoubtedly one of the first gay couples in Quebec cinema? Which is exceptional for a heterosexual creator at that time, still marked by the seal of the Catholic religion in Quebec.
Subsequently, he became interested in a group of students and activists in Bingo, one of the biggest commercial successes of Quebec cinema in the 1970s ; and also to an environmental scandal, in suspense Panic, where a factory pours chemicals into the water of the St. Lawrence, contaminating thousands of children in the city. We also owe him The Doves, in 1972, Chocolate eclair in 1978, as well as the youth classic The frog and the whale, with the young Fanny Lauzier and Marina Orsini, one of his muses.
Moreover, Jean-Claude Lord, who directed Marina Orsini in Gold and Throw and count, launched the careers of several young Quebec actresses in the 70s and 80s, such as Isabel Richer, Geneviève Brouillette… without forgetting Lise Thouin, his spouse and the mother of his two children Marie-Noëlle Lord and Jean-Sébastien Lord.
The transition to the small screen
After cinema, television was Jean-Claude Lord’s playground. He directed the first season of the cult series Throw and count, which earned him a Gémeaux Prize in 1987. He revolutionized the way series were filmed on Quebec TV sets, but he was also accused of populism. “What I was criticized for a lot here, in Quebec – my American nature, my American style – was an asset [pour Lance et compte], he explains today. But that, I did not know before, “he confided to the microphone of Stéphan Bureau, in May 2019.
In the 2000s, he wrote the many sequels to this popular series, written by Réjean Tremblay, on the world of professional hockey. He also made Diva, Jasmine, Lobby and Quadra, a drama that launched Maxime Denommée’s TV career in 2000.
More recently, the filmmaker has made a few feature films in English, including thriller of horror Visiting Hours, starring William Shatner and Michael Ironside. Lord has also filmed episodes of 30 lives and the first season of District 31, in 2016.
The honours
In 2017, Jean-Claude Lord received the Guy-Mauffette Prize for his entire career, one of the most prestigious prizes awarded by the Government of Quebec to a creator for his remarkable contribution to the audiovisual field.
During the Gémeaux Awards in 2017, Gabriel Pelletier, President of the Association des Réalisateurs et Réalisatrices du Québec, described Jean-Claude Lord’s contribution to the cultural landscape as follows: “His most invaluable legacy to Quebec’s cultural life will have been produce entertaining works which, for the most part, will also have made us think. »
For more than half a century, despite the obstacles that stood before him, Jean-Claude Lord always fought to bring his social convictions to the screen. “I am someone who knows how to fight for his ideas and who has managed to materialize at least a dozen of them, which in my opinion justifies nearly 55 years of work”, he declared in November 2017, receiving his Quebec price.
Ceremonies to commemorate his life will take place later “when sanitary conditions can lend themselves to a more meaningful gathering”, wrote his son Jean-Sébastien on Facebook.
With Alice Girard-Bossé, La Presse