A great story with beautiful humanity
Quebec filmmaker makes Dallas Buyers Club for the love of cinema
TORONTO It took 20 years — and a Canadian director with a facility for low-budget cinema — to get Ron Woodroof’s story to the screen.
In the 1980s, Woodroof was a Texas electrician who liked women, drugs, and the rodeo, although not necessarily in that order: a good old boy who, like many of his peers, adopted a casual homophobia about the AIDS epidemic that was sweeping the world.
Then Woodroof was diagnosed with the disease (he got it from a woman who was an intravenous drug user), and he became something of a champion of the gay community. Told he had only 30 days to live, and shunned by his friends, he became an expert in AIDS drugs and eventually started an organization that provided access to alternative medicine and treatments. It was called the Dallas Buyers Club.
Screenwriter Craig Borten began working on a script about Woodroof’s unusual story in 1992. It went through a lot of incarnations — at various points, Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling were going to star in the movie — but it never got made.
Then Jean-Marc Vallée came along.
The Quebec filmmaker — who made a name for himself with the coming-of-age movie C.R.A.Z.Y. and made his first Hollywood movie, Young Victoria, a few years later — said he read the screenplay with mounting excitement. “This is golden material,” he remembers saying. “How come this film hasn’t been made?”
Vallée answers his own question by examining how the movies work these days.
“I think it’s part subject matter and part the complication of how you finance and make a film in Hollywood today,” Vallée said at the Toronto film festival, where the film — also called Dallas Buyers Club — had its premiere.
“I guess making an indie film, a character-driven film now in the States, is a tough thing, you know?” he said. “It seems easy to make a blockbuster, a $50-million film and more with the studios ... We made it the indie way.”
Dallas Buyers Club stars an alarmingly thin Matthew McConaughey as Woodroof — the actor lost more than 40 pounds for the part — as well as Jennifer Garner as a sympathetic nurse and Jared Leto as Rayon, a flamboyant transsexual who joins in Woodroof’s drug business. For Leto, the part marks a return to movies after six years off while he established himself as a rock musician with the band Thirty Seconds To Mars.
Despite the big names, the movie was made for $4.9 million. It’s set in Texas, but Vallée shot it in New Orleans to take advantage of Louisiana tax incentives, and he used many of the low-budget techniques of American indie icon John Cassavetes.
Cassavetes — an actor in bigbudget films but a director of personal, cinema verité dramas — also influenced Vallée in his previous film, Café de Flore, a mystical love story. But for Dallas Buyers Club, he went fully into the Cassavetes method: long shots, some of them out of focus, and a mobile camera that follows actors from room to room, giving them unusual freedom. It was made with natural lighting, which saved money on the crew and meant that actors didn’t have to stand in a certain place.
“It creates another dynamic on set,” Vallée says. “The actors don’t feel the heat of the spot(light), they don’t feel they have to hit the mark and feel the heat.” The rehearsals were filmed, and they could end up in the movie. He went through a typical instruction:
“‘Where do we go Jean-Marc?’ ‘Let’s find out. We’ll put the camera there, I’m not sure yet. Action.’”
If actors went too far away from a window, say, the scene had to be redone. Sometimes, though, “it was magical. It was like (he snaps his fingers) bang. Rehearsal one, that was great.” It also saved money. “Since there was no waiting for the light, it was doable and we didn’t suffer from it. We were always shooting, never waiting, always shooting the rehearsal so we had material on the hard drive.”
Vallée says he’ll work that way again on his next movie, the $15-million drama Wild, which has just begun filming. It stars Reese Witherspoon in the true story of a woman who hikes the Pacific Crest Trail alone.
Dallas Buyers Club is also a true story, but it’s “inspired” by the reality. Woodroof existed, but the other characters were fictions created by screenwriters.
“The challenge was to create a great emotional journey in fiction, and also respect the facts of the period and of Ron’s life, and being faithful to this,” Vallée says. “It’s the story of an underdog. A great story with beautiful humanity.”
The Toronto screenings, held the day before Vallée met the press, created a bit of Oscar buzz, particularly for Leto’s performance but also for Vallée’s direction. He takes the excitement in stride.
“At my age, I’m 50, I’ve done films before and I felt great when I presented Young Victoria and Café de Flore and didn’t have any good reviews.
“And before yesterday I felt great about this film. And today the reviews are there and they’re great. But even if they weren’t, I had bad reviews in the past and I felt great about my films, about the result. It’s being happy with what you do and not with what people say about it.”
In some ways, he says, he’s like Ron Woodroof.
“I could relate to the guy: trying to change the system, trying to do it differently, trying to go out there and, let’s just do it for the love of cinema and because we believe in the story and we want to tell it to the world.”