When Lars von Trier hit rock bottom a few months ago, Matt Dillon was one of the first people he turned to. “I was in Vienna when I got his call: ‘Matt, things aren’t going well, I’m going to rehab, my girlfriend dumped me…’”remembers the American actor, who lent his features and his disorder to the serial killer of The House That Jack Built (2018), the latest film by the Danish filmmaker. “ I painted a painting, titled Lars needs a new girlfriend. And I came to offer it to him, at his home in Copenhagen. He framed it in his living room. Then he tasked me with finding him a girlfriend. »
The anecdote, told in the soft suite of a Cannes palace in May, does not say whether the mission was successfully completed. It does, however, give the measure of the confidence that the 60-year-old actor inspires, from the first handshake, frank and warm: when it comes to bringing people and hearts together, this man seems capable of moving mountains.
We were able to experience it on the Croisette, where he presented Maria, by Jessica Palud, on the ordeals experienced by actress Maria Schneider (1952-2011), a few weeks before its theatrical release on June 19. As soon as he was told that Fernando Trueba was also in Cannes, Matt Dillon moved heaven and earth to find the Spanish filmmaker, who directed him in his next film, Haunted Heartscheduled for the fall. “I had such a crush on Fernando with Jessica’s film… He knew Maria Schneider, it would be wonderful if he attended the premiere.” And to immediately write to Trueba, whose sense of “romantic suspense”.
“Strangeness in the gaze”
The formula suits Dillon well, who knows like no one else how to convey, on the screen, transports of all kinds – from anger to fear, from laughter to desire… The first images of The House That Jack Built show him entering dark forests, behind the wheel of a van; the last ones see him crossing, one by one, the circles of hell. The rest of his filmography is to match, unstable, mobile and all-terrain: thug mounted on springs in the diptych by Francis Ford Coppola, Outsiders And Rusty Jameswho revealed him in 1983, a robber wandering at Gus Van Sant’s house (Drugstore Cowboy1989), frozen investigator for the Farrelly brothers (Mary at all cost, 1998), here cosmonaut (Proximaby Alice Winocour, 2019), there mechanic chomping at the bit (Asteroid Cityby Wes Anderson, 2023), his characters never stay still.
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