On the occasion of the release of his miniseries The night Laurier Gaudreault woke up presented on Club Illico, Xavier Dolan discusses the difficulty of integrating Quebec songs into cinema or television.
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“There are a lot of songs from Quebec that I wanted to use, by Isabelle Boulay, by Bruno Pelletier, which are in fact songs whose rights have been ceded because at that time, I think the artists were at the beginning of their career and they wanted to give up their rights to their “label”. These [maisons de disque là] went bankrupt or sold their catalog to bigger players,” he explained to QUB radio.
The director also lamented that a particular record company closed the door to him, “which does not answer the phone, which charges a fortune and which prevents the Quebec public from hearing the songs of artists on television or in the cinema. and which prevents these artists from being able, through sustainability, to fit into the works over time and into the heritage”, he added, at the microphone of Sophie Durocher.
The system that Dolan describes deprived his series of certain Quebec songs.
“There are about ten Quebec songs that I had to give up, either because I didn’t have an answer from that same label, or because it was simply too expensive because of the way we calculate the rates, which will ensure that a song by Ginette Reno will cost me the same price as a song by Coldplay”, he regretted.
The Quebec producer also reacted to the journalist’s question concerning the disaffection of young people for Quebec culture.
“It pains me in relation to our culture in general and our identity, there is something that is lost […], he said. We have to go find those generations who are used to visual standards, narrative standards, which are a little different from what we offer them.