Award-winning Canadian film-maker who directed Dallas Buyers Club and Big Little LiesThe Canadian film-maker Jean-Marc Vallée, who has died aged 58, apparently of a heart attack, handled serious subjects with bounce and briskness, earning prizes and respect in the process. His film Dallas Buyers Club (2013), starring Matthew McConaughey as a rodeo rider who illegally imports retroviral drugs for himself and his fellow Aids patients in the mid-1980s, was directed with great clarity. McConaughey and his co-star Jared Leto, who played an HIV-positive transgender woman, won
Oscars. Moments in the film that might have been heightened or underlined – such as a sexual encounter that qualifies as carefree only because both participants have already contracted Aids, or a fantasy scene in a room full of butterflies – were instead folded nonchalantly into the mix.
“It really comes down to the fact that I just don’t want to show off in any way,” he said. “I love telling these stories that feel real, and authentic, so I try not to get too ‘Hollywood’ with it all when I am
shooting. I just say, ‘Let’s get rid of this, go handheld, use natural light.’” The critic Anthony Lane called him “a film-maker of considerable cunning, who takes predicaments that should by rights deflate the heart … and turns them into nimble entertainments”.