Plot twist: Xavier Dolan is currently working on a horror film that he hopes will begin shooting in the fall of 2025. The announcement comes just over a year after the director said he wanted to “stop making movies.”
“I’m working on a film,” he said in an interview on the podcast. No filter. In July 2023, Xavier Dolan said he no longer wanted to make films because they “don’t make me happy.” At the time, he didn’t rule out the possibility of creating TV series. But his role as president of the jury for the “Un Certain Regard” section of the last Cannes Film Festival gave him back the “desire to create,” he explains.
The screenplay, which Xavier Dolan wrote before the pandemic, is a horror story set in France in 1880. A story that “couldn’t be further from me, from my life, from what I know,” he said on the microphone of No filter“However, rereading it, I understand that it is a film about the fear of failure, of being alienated, of being misunderstood, of being rejected, about the difficulty of creating,” added the 35-year-old director.
“So, it’s something I know and don’t know at the same time, in an era and style that I want, and a completely different proposition, where I feel I can surpass myself, learn, grow. But with themes that are dear to me, even in horror.” To finish writing the story, of which there are 20 pages left, Xavier Dolan specifies that he will go on a trip.
This mysterious film project is not the only one he will be writing for, however: the filmmaker also took advantage of his participation in the podcast to announce that he has “started writing” a new TV series. The details surrounding the latter are still unknown.
The “long break” that he announced on the airwaves of France Inter in January 2023 thus seems to be well and truly over.