Xavier Dolan

What I'm interested in is how your career choices can affect your private life, romantically or with your mom, your relatives, your friends, your hometown, and how media manipulates information - not newspapers or blogs, but the magazines that people impulse-buy that tell you what's hot and who's not.

'Heartbeats' is a film on people magnifying and subliming reality when they're in love. Hence the overstylized look, the aesthetics, the robes, the dresses, the vintage, hipster-ish look: All of this is voluntary. I'm not a hipster. I'm not!

I haven't modelled since I was 12 - that was a one-time thing, and I did it as a kid to make a little money to save up for university. Acting is my first love as well as writing and eventually producing and directing.

What I look for when I see a piece of art for the first time is some kind of emotional, intellectual experience, that's a combination of both of those things and is informed by my knowledge and something new that I see the artist doing.

You probably have to have redundant levee systems with canals in between them, like the Dutch have, to make sure that incoming water is channeled off to areas where you deal with it rather than have it drown you.