Under the influence | Jean-Carl Boucher, a cinephile ahead of his time

Artists are also the sum of the works that have shaped them. Jean-Carl Boucher, a child actor who became a great film buff and director, shares his work with our columnist Marc Cassivi, as part of our new column “Under Influences”.

Marc Cassivi: I was going to ask you what was the first record you bought with your pocket money, but I forgot that we are not from the same generation…

Jean-Carl Boucher: I did know the CD. My father was really into music and he had a Walkman… A Walkman, but not with cassettes!

A Discman…

Yes, that’s it, the Discman! I was one of the only ones who came to school with this famous Discman. I consumed a little bit of everything. My father is a big fan of jazz and classical music, so I had access to his entire collection. He introduced me to the world of the Beach Boys. He told me that the obvious thing was the Beatles, but that the Beach Boys were also really worth it.

There couldn’t have been many in the schoolyard listening. Pet Sounds… Did that make you a bug?

I don’t think I was considered strange, but my friends certainly didn’t necessarily have the same interests as me. They were more “adult” tastes, but it was my way of communicating with my father. He was also a big movie buff. He was the one who showed me the great classics. I remember going down to the basement and he was listening pulp Fiction. I was in fourth or fifth grade. I was curious. He paused the movie and gave me a little context. He wasn’t some unworthy father forcing me to watch violent scenes! He knew he could trust me. We always discussed the movies before and after.

Est-ce que ton père s’est essayé à des œuvres qui t’ont paru plus rébarbatives ? Ça me fait penser à mon propre parcours de père cinéphile qui a essayé trop vite de transmettre sa passion. J’ai montré à mes garçons Les Quatre Cents Coups en me disant que ce personnage de leur âge allait forcément les intéresser…

Quand mon père a vu que je m’intéressais au cinéma, c’était pour lui une évidence de me montrer Citizen Kane. Il m’a expliqué qu’à l’époque, c’était révolutionnaire et que c’était considéré comme le plus grand film de tous les temps. J’ai tellement trouvé ça dull ! J’étais beaucoup trop jeune. On regardait un film noir et blanc dans le noir ; pour un enfant, c’était presque écrasant.

Mes garçons m’ont demandé si on pouvait regarder des films en couleur…

C’est étrange parce qu’aujourd’hui, c’est ce que j’aime le plus [le noir et blanc]. I think if he hadn’t shown it to me at that time, I might not have revisited it so early in my life. There’s something of that left, definitely. It’s striking. My father liked us to have experiences together. He made me believe that The Blair Witch Projectit was true! I saw with him Halloween by John Carpenter and it’s the film that shook me the most. The terror I felt, I can still feel it. At 30, I go to a chalet and I think about it! Cinema allows you to experience these great sensations. I thank my father more and more for that. It’s so enriching to be able to have access to that at a young age.

Je sais qu’il ne faut pas tout croire ce qu’on lit sur Wikipédia, mais c’est vrai que tu es né à Regina ?

Oui. Pour apprendre l’anglais, mes parents sont partis dans l’Ouest canadien, où ma mère est devenue prof et où mon père a pu travailler en informatique. Ils ont eu leurs enfants là-bas, mais pas dans l’intention de rester. J’ai quand même vécu à Regina jusqu’à 8 ans et demi. Pour mes parents, c’était une parenthèse, mais pour moi, c’est une période marquante. Mes amis étaient tous anglophones. Quand je suis arrivé au Québec, j’ai presque eu un choc culturel, même si mes parents nous parlaient en français, évidemment. Mais je n’ai jamais regardé le cinéma américain doublé. J’ai pu avoir accès aux vraies voix. Je me souviens qu’à l’époque, j’ai vu Mystic River. Ça m’a troublé. Les performances sont incroyables.

C’est le plus grand rôle de Sean Penn…

Il y avait aussi Tim Robbins et Marcia Gay Harden. Les trois ont été nommés aux Oscars. C’est grâce à Mystic River que j’ai eu l’appel du jeu. J’ai compris qu’il y avait moyen de transmettre quelque chose d’épique avec une scène entre deux gars assis devant la maison, qui jasent. Ça a allumé chez moi l’envie du jeu et de la direction d’acteurs. Clint Eastwood, clairement, avait quelque chose à voir dans le fait de les mettre en contexte parfaitement pour que ces personnages communiquent. J’ai compris ce qu’était transmettre une émotion par le cinéma.

Ta famille est revenue à Laval, et tu as commencé à jouer jeune.

Oui, super jeune. Ce n’était pas clair que je voulais faire ça dans la vie, mais j’avais une attirance pour ce milieu-là. Mes parents n’arrivaient pas à me caser dans un truc sportif parce que je n’étais pas très bon ! [Rires] Besides, I found myself auditioning for a baseball movie with Pier-Luc Funk, in which the character was too dumb to be on a team. [Un été sans point ni coup sûr de Francis Leclerc en 2008] !

With Simon Pigeon too, another one of your gang [que Jean-Carl Boucher a dirigé avec Funk dans son premier long métrage, Flashwood]…

Yes, except that Simon is a great athlete! We met there, and since then, we see each other almost every day. It was an open casting, to create this baseball team, and Pier-Luc and I, we played two bad players. He was a good fit ! It made sense to me to be accepted into a sports team as the pocket, but also the comic relief. That gave me the bug, because I obviously met Francis Leclerc, but also the director of photography Steve Asselin, who made the four films in which I act with Ricardo. They saw that I had an interest in cinema, so they brought me stacks of DVDs. I watched them when I got back from my day of shooting. I was 12 years old and I watched Kubrick, Tarkovsky and Polanski. Chinatown !

This was your film school! You were training as an actor, in acting, and as a film buff and future director. Did you already have directing in mind?

Yes, I was really interested. At 12, you don’t think that your job will be to be an actor. You see it as an experience, a great summer. I took the opportunity to learn about directing, and how a shoot works. I direct on TV [District 31, 5^e Rang, STAT]I made a feature film, but I never took a directing class. I think it all comes from that summer. They explained the basics to me and, from there, it was very instinctive.

It was a summer without a point or a hit, but with a lot of cinema…

Exactly! With movie enthusiasts. We still say it today, with Pier-Luc and Simon: we were lucky to make this film. Francis is really a gangster who gave us the taste to stay in this environment. We became a bit of a family. It’s an indestructible bond.

Do you have any particular tastes that developed in your twenties?

I’m going to tell you about my two favorite movies and that will give you a bit of an idea. To our loves by Maurice Pialat: I have the poster at home, which takes up a lot of space. Maybe to show how much this film speaks to me. It touched me so much, marked me. For me, it is a film that can be listened to again and again and shown to others. It is important in my appreciation of a film to want to listen to it again and rediscover it in the company of other people.

Tu me donnes envie de le ressortir de ma DVDthèque et de le montrer à mon fils.

Je t’avoue que je suis un peu tombé en amour avec Sandrine Bonnaire. Je ne te mentirai pas. C’est le côté naturaliste qui me plaît aussi. On sent clairement que Maurice Pialat recherche la vérité absolue. La scène des fossettes… On peut faire ça au cinéma et que ce soit divertissant ! Ça m’a fasciné. Et puis l’autre film, c’est Lost in Translation [de Sofia Coppola]which I could listen to over and over again. I’m fine In this movie. It goes beyond the story.

And what is said secretly at the end…

The atmosphere is pleasant. It may be a generality, but there is a form of solitude among young moviegoers and there is an enormous comfort that comes from these characters. I identified completely with these two souls. It feels good to spend two hours with them. Everything I saw during this period, Gummo And Julien Donkey-Boy by Harmony Korine, more stuff undergroundhad a big impact on me. Through Korine, I discovered Herzog, who was his mentor. I remember going to the Forum to see Into the Abyssabout the death penalty, after school, alone. There was only one other guy in the room. It was so intense that we talked about the film together afterwards.

I remember very well going alone to the cinema in Plaza Alexis Nihon, just across from the Forum, one school afternoon, and discovering Cinema Paradiso [de Giuseppe Tornatore]. I must have been 15. It opened my eyes to international cinema.

I have a very good relationship with Cinema Paradiso. When we shot 1981I felt like I understood all of Ricardo’s sensitivity, who is quite the party animal, when he told me that it was the most beautiful film he had ever seen in his life. I watched it that same evening and I felt like I better understood who he is as a guy and as a filmmaker.

1995by Ricardo Trogi, is on view.