Dallas Buyers Club, by the late Jean-Marc Vallée, became, in 2014, the first film directed by a Quebecer to compete for the Oscar for best film. This is an achievement in itself.
Thanks to the story of Ron Woodroof, a Texas cowboy suffering from AIDS, Jean-Marc Vallée was welcomed, at the same time as his friend Denis Villeneuve, into the select circle of foreign filmmakers who count in Hollywood. He made the transition, unlike many others, without sacrificing his signature: this skilful way of handling ellipses, flashbacks and the unspoken in a staging that is both subtle and raw.
Some directors have a knack for highlighting actors. Jean-Marc Vallée was one of them. His actors were his muses. Marc-André Grondin in CRAZY., Vanessa Paradis in Café de Flore, Reese Witherspoon in Wild, Nicole Kidman in Big Little Lies. And of course, Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey, both Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club.
The unexpected success of this film that nobody wanted to finance in Hollywood – and that McConaughey held at arm’s length for years – owes a lot to the vision instilled by Jean-Marc Vallée.
“Nobody wanted to make this film, but we did it by putting together a terrific team,” said McConaughey, receiving the Golden Globe for best dramatic actor and recognizing the work of the Quebec director.
The filmmaker of CRAZY and of Café de Flore had done miracles with a paltry budget for an American film (4.9 million). Vallée had arrived there in particular by surrounding himself with Quebec artisans: his accomplice Yves Bélanger in cinematography, Marc Côté in visual effects and Martin Pensa, finalist for the Oscar for best editing with a certain John Mac McMurphy (pseudonym of Vallée ).
What is less known is that Jean-Marc Vallée saved in extremis the scenario of Dallas Buyers Club, inspired by the private diaries of Ron Woodroof, who despite himself became an AIDS rights activist by setting up an underground drug market to fight AIDS.
The book by activist Peter Staley, Never Silent – ACT UP and My Life in Activism, in bookstores since October and an extract of which was published in the magazine Vanity Fair, refers to it. Staley says there that Vallée, who had seen a documentary on his activism, offered him a small role in Dallas Buyers Club.
Reading the script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, Staley found that it was based in part on a dangerous conspiracy theory popularized in the 1980s by a professor of molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley, Peter Duesberg, arguing that HIV was not responsible … for AIDS.
Conspiracyists, inspired by Duesberg’s denial theories – rejected as baseless by the scientific community – have since suggested that it is AIDS drugs, not HIV itself, that make patients sick.
PHOTO ANNE MARIE FOX, SUPPLIED BY REMSTAR
Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club
“If the script I had just read had made its way into theaters with a cast of Hollywood stars, AIDS denial would have risen again, and people would have died for no reason, as a result,” writes Peter Staley. . When he read the script, there were only three weeks left until filming began. He immediately expressed his fears to the production, by email. And it was Jean-Marc Vallée himself who called him back five minutes later.
Vallée, says Staley, knew about AIDS as an “average progressive straight man.” That is to say not a lot. The filmmaker may well repeat that he wanted “the film to be beautiful and true”, Staley had the intuition that the Quebecer had been fooled by his writers.
During an audio conference organized by Vallée, Staley understood that one of the writers was in fact a disciple of Duesberg’s theories and that she had added a denialist thread to the story. He managed to sow doubt in Vallée… two weeks before the shoot, even though his budget had just been cut by almost 40%.
Until the very last minute, despite resistance from the writers, Peter Staley hounded Vallée on details that might have implied that Woodroof was an AIDS denier, which he was not.
In a last email, writes Staley, Jean-Marc Vallée promised him that Dallas Buyers Club would be “a beautiful film which does not support negationism”.
The Quebecer, of course, kept his word. Until the day before the film’s world premiere, at the Toronto film festival, Jean-Marc Vallée made changes to his film to ensure that there is no ambiguity and that it cannot be diverted from its meaning for propaganda purposes by militant deniers.
Dallas Buyers Club was a finalist in six categories at the Oscars, winning two statuettes. “But all the credit goes to Jean-Marc Vallée”, writes Staley at the end of the extract from his book published in Vanity Fair. “I put him through hell, and he kept his promise to me in one of his emails: that in all his films, he” tries to capture humanity and reveal the beauty which underlies it ”. ”
It’s a sentence that sums up the man, and the artist, exceptional that he was.