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.

I don't think the way I portray mother's and son's relationships has anything to do with my age or generation. It has to do with what I lived with my own mother and what it's transformed into and the point of view it has given me on mothers and women. The way I was brought up with women. It's all about personal background.

'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!

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

The importance of heart health became very real for me when my father died of heart disease seven years ago. Having experienced the loss first hand, I am inspired to do everything I can to break the cycle and prevent families from losing loved ones to this preventable disease.