Xavier Dolan Quotes

#1. There might be a proper age to know how to tell a story, but there's no proper age to start telling them.

Xavier Dolan

#2. I'm just trying to blur this very clear line we've drawn and are drawing over and over and over again between communities. Saying those are queer films and those are films. I would love for that line to disappear. For that frontier to be abolished once and for all.

Xavier Dolan

#3. 'Titanic' made me want to tell stories ... To have all these characters and costumes and have ambition and think big and have dreams ... It came at a very troubled period of my life.

Xavier Dolan

#4. The problems I have with a flawed script are always revealed in the editing room.

Xavier Dolan

#5. I love doing costumes. The costume is an actor's first line, so it's gotta be right!

Xavier Dolan

#6. I'd like to be taken in charge of as an actor, not to be abandoned with asinine dialogue and meaningless actions or stereotyped characters. I'd like to feel like I'm in a character driven story.

Xavier Dolan

#7. I have a strange relationship with influences because mine are mostly literary or painters or poets, who I'll even quote. I don't do tributes to cinema.

Xavier Dolan

#8. A movie that is unable to elicit emotion isn't a movie.

Xavier Dolan

#9. I plough all my money into my next film, so I never actually have any money. It's always invisible.

Xavier Dolan

#10. I feel like Adele is a diva. Not in the bad way. She is one of the greatest voices of this industry and of her own art. What she offers is so unique that she's risen to such a status that very few artists can enjoy.

Xavier Dolan

#11. What motivates every other decision artistically or technically is the acting. This is what motivates everything. Never can a camera move be incompatible with the emotion of the actor at that moment. The movement, the style, the atmosphere, everything is dictated by the actor.

Xavier Dolan

#12. Adele's look is meticulously thought through and completely of her own traits. She has such a powerful beauty, such an emotional voice, and the kohl, the hair, everything feels organically molded to her personality.

Xavier Dolan

#13. I got a part in a package of commercials for this big drugstore from the age of 6 to 10. For four years I shot those commercials, and old ladies would stop me on the street and grab my cheeks. That's how it started.

Xavier Dolan

#14. Here's the thing with the costumes for 'Mommy': Given the background and social strata that the characters come from, you can't really imagine that they've gone shopping lately, so we went for that very normcore, fashionless era in history, the early 2000s, which was completely transitional.

Xavier Dolan

#15. The motivation for making movies is that people actually see them.

Xavier Dolan

#16. I don't really mind not being a part of a film - because if there is no part for me, I will never force myself upon a film. I feel like it's just a distraction. If it is not organically incorporated into the story, it just feels like a stupid appearance, like a sort of wink. I hate that.

Xavier Dolan

#17. I think great artists have no time to waste with having disproportionate egos and irrational requests. They're too focused on their work to actually lose themselves in hysterical spirals where they become monsters or tyrants.

Xavier Dolan

#18. I'd rather be referred to as a precocious young Quebec talent, than not be referred to at all.

Xavier Dolan

#19. I design all of the costumes for my movies, actually.

Xavier Dolan

#20. Music was the only voice of cinema for a very long time before we had sound; it's organically linked to cinema itself.

Xavier Dolan

#21. I don't master my craft or my style enough to have any philosophy or dogma to which I feel I belong.

Xavier Dolan

#22. Film-making is not liberating. It drains a lot out of you, and it's fulfilling only temporarily. It's a very thankless thing at times. When you're spending all that time on a film, you don't want 40,000 people to see it - it's just not enough. You dream of more.

Xavier Dolan

#23. To me, the idea of success is to be able to work with people you admire.

Xavier Dolan

#24. When I first got to Cannes, I was very insecure about everything, so I put on this extravagant facade. Can you blame me? I was 19.

Xavier Dolan

#25. Cinema is a thankless industry where sometimes to appear on the cinematic scenery is a thing for late bloomers and people who are very patient. The places are accounted, and the space is often unwelcoming. Money is rare, and independent voices are muted by the almost complete absence of risk takers.

Xavier Dolan

#26. I'm sick of people imposing cultural references and influences on me, but I'm not sick of people talking about my age.

Xavier Dolan

#27. I hadn't watched any Hitchcock movies when I made 'Tom at the Farm,' except for 'Vertigo' when I was 8 years old. I don't have a sophisticated film knowledge, but I have seen the legacy of classic movies in broader entertainment.

Xavier Dolan

#28. The nature and the DNA of IMAX has been redefined in the past years to shoot these huge blockbusters. But I think that it's not the sole purpose of IMAX to capture cars exploding in your face.

Xavier Dolan

#29. It's become a habit to make films where the father is absent. My father impresses me, but the father figure does not.

Xavier Dolan

#30. As a director you want to have actors, not only surpassing themselves, but also going somewhere, going different places.

Xavier Dolan

#31. I have struggles in screenwriting that lead me to a third act that's always more or less efficiently wrapped up in a fourth act that's trying to give closure to too many things.

Xavier Dolan

#32. I have the impression that every time I'm heartbroken, I leave a bit of myself behind. I am the believer. I go back and do the same mistakes over and over again and sign them proudly.

Xavier Dolan

#33. Facts are, directors are not thinking of me; they think I only act in my films, because they're stupid. Or they think I'm a control freak, that I will try to, I don't know, pimp their scripts and just change everything, which I will never do.

Xavier Dolan

#34. I don't have mom issues or dad issues. I think I have found peace about many things in my past. I have forgiven and asked to be forgiven.

Xavier Dolan

#35. Six years, I didn't act. Then I wrote myself a role - I won prizes all over the world.

Xavier Dolan

#36. I'd like to do something meaningful in the smallest ways, not just words or idiotic writing.

Xavier Dolan

#37. Acting is everything to me and it's at the core of every decision. Whatever importance costumes, details, lights, camera, dialogue and everything else have, if the acting is bad, cheap, or overdone everything else is just gone.

Xavier Dolan

#38. In 'Laurence Anyways,' Nathalie Baye is Laurence's mother, and she is quite an awful mother. Still, she is the only one in the end who truly accepts her daughter.

Xavier Dolan

#39. Orson Welles was lazy. He was a late bloomer.

Xavier Dolan

#40. I don't belong to any school or clique or ghetto. I don't have any preconceived ideas. I'm trying to serve a story and not a genre or a style.

Xavier Dolan

#41. My extreme characters are in a state of rebellion or who are being ostracized or being misunderstood, or misfits or trying to fit in and fighting for their rights to love, live, and co-exist. They sort of mirror my own demons.

Xavier Dolan

#42. I was a very violent kid. I think movies and writing and art have been a way of channeling this.

Xavier Dolan

#43. My aunt Julie was a production manager, and she heard of an opening. Some show was looking for children to run around the house or whatever. I auditioned and got the part, and I showed up in all of my monstrous energy, bouncing everywhere like an electron.

Xavier Dolan

#44. I'd love to perform with other actors and act with actors, true actors. I would like to be in a movie and have full room for acting.

Xavier Dolan

#45. 'Heartbeats' is a film on people magnifying and subliming reality when they're in love. Hence the overstylized look, the aesthetics, the robes, the dresses, the vintage, hipster-ish look: All of this is voluntary. I'm not a hipster. I'm not!

Xavier Dolan

#46. I love women in my heart but not in my undies.

Xavier Dolan

#47. I'm very much a hypochondriac, worried about dying, and not having enough time to work with the people I want to work with and being fulfilled as an actor.

Xavier Dolan

#48. For me, 'Mommy' was about developing very humane characters that would be very credible and endearing and work onscreen.

Xavier Dolan

#49. Of all the labels and tags and epithets people have forced upon me, there's one I don't dislike. I get called the 'enfant terrible.' In every article, it's always there. So I have to give that a meaning.

Xavier Dolan

#50. I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.

Xavier Dolan

#51. My first language is French. I just love words so much, and in French it feels like I can say whatever I want however I want.

Xavier Dolan

#52. I don't personally do movies for myself and a faction of very cerebral cinephiles - I do it for everybody and wish for the largest amount of people to relish whatever they find they can relish in.

Xavier Dolan

#53. I think anything is possible to anyone who dreams, dares, works and never gives up.

Xavier Dolan

#54. When I write a film, I have already made the trailer

Xavier Dolan

#55. It's important to see how people see your work and how they feel about it. I know a lot of directors who are like, 'I never read reviews,' and I'm like, 'Yeah I can tell.'

Xavier Dolan

#56. No one knows me in the States because the movies have been released in such an awkward, irregular fashion, all by different distributors. There is no continuity.

Xavier Dolan

#57. It's ludicrous to think people work for you: 'a film by ... ' doesn't exist. Directed by, maybe, but it's a film from a collective, a group of people whom you consult and seek your counsel and advice and vice versa, too.

Xavier Dolan

#58. The father figure doesn't impress me. I have a very friendly relationship with my father, but that wasn't always the case. My mother had custody, and I only saw him every other weekend. I never knew him well enough for him to inspire me.

Xavier Dolan

#59. I think that when you're in love, you progressively go back to who you are.

Xavier Dolan

#60. I don't find it hard to direct myself. I can easily think of me as a horrible performer or a good performer. I work with actors who cannot stand watching or looking at themselves, which is not my case. I can have an eye and perspective on whether I'm terrible or good enough for me.

Xavier Dolan

#61. I've been recording forever. I'm a watcher. I'm a stalker. I love everything about people. It's always been a passion for me to observe.

Xavier Dolan

#62. I think of 'Mommy' as very simplistic or not simplistic, but I wish for the style to actually work with what you see onscreen and what you feel in that very moment. I hope we did not disrespect the characters by being too flamboyant when it's not necessary.

Xavier Dolan

#63. All my life, I heard, 'Stop daydreaming,' 'Get over yourself,' 'You'll never get there,' 'Aim lower,' 'You'll hurt yourself,' from teachers, family, and friends.

Xavier Dolan