Meeting with Xavier Dolan: “It is essential to offer works that are emotionally accessible to everyone”

It is a film about architecture, but also about Paris. What does this city mean to you?

Paris is so beautiful that we no longer necessarily know where and how to look at it. There is beauty around every corner. This is perhaps something that Parisians forget… although. The monuments of the Mitterrand era occupy a special place: they carry a different language, mark a real transition. Some are more successful than others, of course, but all catch the eye because they stand out from the rest of the city.

The film highlights the complexities of the French political system, in particular those of cohabitation which we see from the point of view of the character Otto, a Dane, who does not always understand these singularities.

Scandinavia follows its own rules. As a Canadian, it’s not a shock to see a creator come up against bureaucracy, its parameters, its demands and its compromises. Even today, there is a whole discourse which caricatures artists, presenting them as fanciful minds living on the hook of a system. Their financial reality, however, remains very poorly understood. We imagine people in beautiful clothes, rolling in gold… But frankly, that’s a very poor understanding of the behind the scenes of this industry. It’s easy to have preconceptions… especially when they serve to justify a form of contempt.

In an interview, Stéphane Demoustier confided that he wanted people to take away from his film that there is “no creation without political will”. Do you agree?

I completely agree. Creating is a political act. It is engaging in a social language – with society, with ourselves, with the people we love, with the future we imagine and the way we wish to transform the present. All creation is political, even the most intimate, because it presupposes sharing. It is a form of democratization of oneself, one’s life, one’s concerns. Our themes and our personal reflections become, through artistic gesture, collective. And in this idea of ​​collective, there is necessarily a political dimension in my opinion. The real question, then, is whether politics follows and supports creation.

Speaking of the collective, how did the filming go?