Black Sheep interviews Marc-André Grondin

NOBODY'S GOON
An interview with GOON star, Marc-André Grondin

Before Québécois actor, Marc-André Grondin started work on the Canadian hockey comedy, GOON, he was not what you would call a great skater. “I skated like shit,” is how he actually put it to me.

This meant Grondin would have to train to convincingly play Xavier Laflamme, a major league hockey player burnout, who has been demoted to the minor league, which he can still barely keep up with. “The players today are machines. They start at 12 in the gym. There are like five guys in all of the NHL who are my size,” he explains of his motivation to pick up his game, with only a hint of self-deprecation. “So I trained. I had to go on a big diet. It was two and a half months of hell.” But worth it, I’m sure.

Laflamme is a character Grondin knows well. In fact, the tweaked out, trashy Québécois hockey bum is a character we all know well, whether we’re hockey fans or not. Rather than allow the character to sink into cliche though, friend and GOON co-writer, Jay Baruchel, worked with Grondin to keep the character feeling real. “When Jay sent me the script, there were a couple of things we knew we had to work on, mainly to not make this French-Canadian character a joke. We didn’t want ‘Tabarnac’ to be the punch line.”

Their efforts were successful. Actually, Baruchel, along with co-writer, Evan Goldberg (SUPERBAD), and director, London, Ontario native, Michael Dowse (FUBAR), injected Goon with so much genuine heart that none of the main characters succumb to any of their potential trappings.

Grondin, with co-star Seann William Scott

“The heart comes from Jay. He’s just like that,” Grondin says of his longtime friend, and fellow Montrealer. “He can see a douchebag, a nerd, a gay guy, a Russian, stuck up parents or potheads, whatever. Even though he labels them, he doesn’t judge them. I think that’s what comes out in Goon.”

And did Baruchel write the part of Laflamme with Grondin in mind? “That’s what he told me,” Grondin says, somewhat suspiciously. When he realizes I’m not sure if he’s kidding or not, he continues, “Well, he told me so early on in the process that I have to believe him.”

My Ottawa Xpress GOON cover story

Ever since Grondin’s breakout in Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y., he has been working consistently in Québec and France. When I ask why he never went after the English market or Hollywood, he gets a little reticent, as if nervous not to say the wrong thing. I learn why when he says, “I don’t really dream of a perfect career because my happiness doesn’t reside in movies,” he admits, candidly. “If you ask me what it would take for me to be happy, I would say a small farm and a family, maybe a few horses. If I work in the US or in France, it doesn’t matter, as long as I can bay my bills and work with interesting people.”

Before we move on, Grondin chimes in with one more thought on the subject. “Obviously I still see some English films and think, fuck, I wish I could have done that.”

Grondin will be seen later this year in the Victor Hugo adaptation, THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, alongside Gérard Depardieu. With GOON now behind him though, is he keeping up with his hockey? “When we finished shooting, I continued working out. I stopped the diet but I continued playing hockey.”

GOON, which also stars Seann William Scott, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Alliance Films.

Black Sheep interviews Jean-Marc Vallée

On September 1, 2011, at 11:00 A.M., Quebecois director, Jean-Marc Vallée, the man behind the Canadian classic, C.R.A.Z.Y., completed his latest film, CAFE DE FLORE. By 5:00 P.M. that same day, he was on a flight to Venice for the world premiere. “I don’t think I have the distance yet to talk well about it,” Vallée explains when we meet at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film’s second festival stop before it’s theatrical release. “In my humble experience, it usually takes a while before I know what words to use.”

Vallee left, with Cafe de Flore lead, Kevin Parent

To be fair, CAFE DE FLORE can be difficult to describe even after you’ve seen it a couple of times. There are two stories told simultaneously that take place far apart from each other in both time and space. In 1960’s Paris, Vanessa Paradis, looking dowdy and plain, plays a mother to a child with Down's syndrome (Marin Gerrier) and in contemporary Montreal, a DJ (Kevin Parent, in a surprisingly solid acting debut) leaves his childhood sweetheart (Helene Florent) for another woman (Evelyne Brochu). “I wanted to make a love story but I wanted the film to have something else too,” Vallée attempts to explain. “I just wasn’t sure what that something else was. It’s not easy to describe but I think the ride is great.”

Vallee shooting with Vanessa Paradis

While I flat out refuse to divulge what exactly the connection is between these vastly different plots, I will say that a simple song connects them on screen and that song also served as the filmmaker’s inspiration for the entire film. The name of that song? Why, “Café de flore”, of course. When he first heard the Doctor Rockit song, Vallée thought, “It’s so epic. I’m going to make a film with this track.” And so the movie is built around this song as well as a general appreciation for music itself. This aspect of the film is the director’s most autobiographical. “Music makes me feel so good, makes me feel alive, makes me dream, makes me want to make movies,” Vallée asserts right before he starts humming the catchy accordion hook from the film’s title track to me.

Vallee taking a coffee break at the Cafe de Flore

Whether you can place your finger on it or not, there is no denying that Vallée’s CAFE DE FLORE most certainly has a pulse. All you need to do is sink into that beat and Vallée will be sure to move you.

This article was originally published in Hour Community.
Click here for the CAFE DE FLORE Black Sheep review.

TIFF Review: CAFE DE FLORE

Written and Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

Starring Vanessa Paradis, Kevin Parent, Helene Florent and Evelyne Brochu

When it comes to love, sometimes it feels as if there are greater forces at work and that we have no control over who we’re drawn to or how deeply we can feel. For some, a love as untamable as this is often considered to be destiny, as if it were written in the stars long before we were ever born. This sense of romance intertwined with fate runs rampant if Quebec filmmaker, Jean-Marc Vallée’s latest feature, CAFE DE FLORE, a love story that needs more than one lifetime in order to work itself out.

With CAFE DE FLORE, Vallée finds a voice as a director he seemed to have lost in his last outing, THE YOUNG VICTORIA. While the period piece was certainly beautiful and had its moments, it played out as, well, already played out. None of the urgency or energy Vallée created with his previous feature and biggest hit, C.R.A.Z.Y., was anywhere to be found. Perhaps it was a language thing because in returning to French language filmmaking again, Vallée is alive in all the choices he makes. And he would need to be on top of every moment in order to make this complex tale come off right. Vallée cuts back and forth between a present day Montreal romance involving a husband (Kevin Parent) who leaves the woman he’s been with since he was a teenager (Helene Florent) for another (Evelyne Brochu) and a complicated relationship between a mother (Vanessa Paradis) and her mentally challenged son (Marin Gerrier) taking place 50 years earlier in Paris.

Whether you enjoy CAFE DE FLORE or not will depend on whether you buy into the connection between these two plots. Vallée tells them both with great style; at times, the editing unspools like a record being mixed and scratched by a DJ, surely done to compliment the main character’s career as one. In fact, a general connection to music is a theme that runs throughout and ties characters together when nothing else is working.   Love itself, and the relationships that spring from it, is hard enough to figure out on its own and Vallée infuses this journey towards understanding into his storytelling. To his credit, Vallée inspires a fair amount of curiosity but the anticipation he builds throughout the film ends up being slightly more satisfying than the destination.