Xavier Dolan Says He’s Retiring Because “The World is Burning”

In the pages of the new issue of GQ France, actor Lucas Bravo (Emily in Paris) interviews Xavier Dolan.

Their discussion tackle’s Dolan desire to retire, even before celebrating his 35th birthday. This leads to his friend asking him "pushed him to become the youngest retiree in cinema?"

"I did not expect this disgust, this weariness in myself. I have no bitterness, but I’ve detached myself. I don't want to direct anymore. I am too passionate about my job to then be irked with the lack of passion and rigor some people give my film. Too much passion to face the fact that people don't want to travel to see my movie or subscribe to a channel to watch my series. I no longer want to be confronted with this information. Hayao Miyazaki said that making films only brought suffering. And that's true […] I'm no longer interested. I was interested when the urgency of the next project was so strong that it made me forget about what came afterwards.

Dolan sees parallels in how the world is burning up and his retirement from cinema. He’s actually turned into a very doom and gloom kind of person:

I think there is a correlation between my abandonment of cinema and my abandonment of the world in general. Recently, I went to London to shoot a commercial. I usually read Apple News when I wake up in the morning. I only see bad news, all the time. The world is burning, our civilization is coming to an end. The planet will rebuild but we humans are coming to the end of a chapter. We are heading towards a monumental change in our existence and many remain in denial. It makes me lose hope in humanity. The idea of making a film for the cinema suddenly becomes very ridiculous.

Maybe Dolan should stop reading Apple News. Dolan had mentioned in July how he’s “afraid of a civil war caused by intolerance" and that it has depressed him to the point of rendering art totally meaningless.

He had originally told Spanish outlet El Pais that he was retired, only to later claim that the quote had been fabricated by the journalist. The problem is that the Spanish outlet then released the translated audio so that we could hear for ourselves what Dolan had actually said, and it clearly fell in line with what was first reported.

Regardless, Dolan is now, again, saying that he’s retiring; humanity is on the brink of catastrophe and he just can’t fathom thinking about cinema at the moment.

Who wants to bet he comes out of retirement in a few years? Or, who knows. maybe he’ll pull a Malick and we won’t see him for the next 20 years, but I wouldn’t bet on that.

One can call Dolan’s rise in the film world as a “sensation”, directing many films in his twenties, for which he received multiple awards, including at the Cannes Film Festival for “Mommy” (2014) and “It’s Only the End of the World” (2016).

If you are Dolan and your last three films have failed critically, then what should your next move be? Dolan has been a polarizing figure for many cinephiles. After surprising the film world, in his mid-20s to boot, with well-received fare such as “Laurence Anyways,” “Mommy,” and "Tom at the Farm,” his last there films were just not that good.