November 2009

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November 2009 

Return to Table of Contents November 2009

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Spotlight

Jean-Marc Vallée’s royal treatment

To be honest, The Young Victoria is the last type of film Montreal’s Jean-Marc Vallée ever thought he’d direct. Sure, he loved Helen Mirren in The Queen and Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, “but not many folks from la belle province think much of the monarchy,” he says. Plus, Vallée’s last film, C.R.A.Z.Y., was an offbeat coming-of-age story set in the Montreal suburbs of South Shore in the 1960s and 1970s, more than a century after Victoria’s coming of age. Can’t get much more different than that.

 

But when some powerful producers, including Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, sent Vallée the script for The Young Victoria — a period piece about the first two decades of Queen Victoria’s life, including the turbulent early years of her reign and her marriage to Prince Albert — he felt he had to do it.

 

“It was not a simple historical film, but a beautiful love story, the kind of love story that we don’t tell in films anymore,” Vallée says in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival just hours before the film makes its North American debut as the event’s Closing Night Gala. It’s scheduled to hit theatres next month.

 

Rising star Emily Blunt plays the cloistered young monarch, and shares the screen with Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany, Jim Broadbent and Miranda Richardson. With such a big-name cast, and the associated big dollars, came a big challenge. “All my life, I made movies where I had the final say on everything,” says Vallée. “In the end credits, they were movies ‘by Jean-Marc Vallée.’ This time, it’s a film ‘directed by Jean-Marc Vallée.’ If the producers let me control everything on set, it was not the case at all in the editing process. I had to learn to become a team player and leave my ego at home.”


– Mathieu Chantelois

 


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