Jean-Marc Vallée obituary

The 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”.

He was equally successful in television. In 2017, he directed a starry cast (Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern) in the first series of Big Little Lies, a murder mystery set in an affluent community in Monterey, California. The show won multiple acting prizes, while Vallée took home a Primetime Emmy and a Directors Guild of America award. Citing his interest in “complicated, strongly etched female leads”, the DGA Quarterly called him “the George Cukor of our times”.

He had previously worked with two members of the show’s cast on Wild (2014), in which Witherspoon played the writer Cheryl Strayed, for whom a 1,100-mile solo hike becomes a way of coping with and reflecting on her troubled past; Dern is seen in flashback as her late mother. Both women were Oscar-nominated.

Vallée was born in Montreal, Canada; his father was a music programmer at the city’s radio stations. It was while studying business management at Collège Ahuntsic, Montreal, that Vallée took a film class for reasons of “pure laziness”, only to find the subject enthralling. He went on to study film at the University of Quebec, and directed music videos and several award-winning shorts after graduating. He made the thriller Black List (1995) before coming to Hollywood to direct the western Los Locos (1997).

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His international breakthrough came with C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), a coming-out drama set in the 1960s and 70s. Having tried to get it off the ground for a decade, he was finally inspired to make it after seeing the British hit Billy Elliot. “I was frustrated with my films in the past,” he said. “I was having some kind of midlife crisis with my career and who I was … Seeing [Billy Elliot] really made me think that I’d better hurry up and make my film.”

C.R.A.Z.Y. was curiously tentative about its hero’s sexuality, though Vallée’s use of music to express characterisation could not be faulted. He ploughed his entire fee, C$600,000 (£350,000) into securing rights to songs by David Bowie, Pink Floyd and others.

Music shaped his approach to directing. He created playlists to help his actors get into character, and blasted out the Rolling Stones on the set of The Young Victoria (2009), scripted by the Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, co-produced by Sarah Ferguson and starring Emily Blunt as the youthful monarch. But his hopes of using songs by the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós on the soundtrack were scuppered by the producers. “I lost creative control,” he said. “It’s not my cut. I would have done something different, mainly with the music.” He called the final score “traditional, classical, almost too cliched”.

He had a happier time making Café de Flore (2011), which juxtaposes the travails of a celebrity DJ in latter-day Montreal with the story of a single mother raising a son with Down’s syndrome in late-60s Paris. Aside from C.R.A.Z.Y., it was the only one of his films on which he took a writing credit. He also directed Demolition (2015), starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a widower whose grief is expressed in a compulsion to destroy or dismantle his surroundings.

Vallée went straight from Big Little Lies into another TV miniseries: Sharp Objects (2018), adapted from Gillian Flynn’s novel about a wayward reporter, played by Amy Adams, covering a murder story in her home town. Vallée, who had previously worked with Adams on an unmade Janis Joplin biopic, directed all eight episodes.

The second series of Big Little Lies (2019), in which Meryl Streep joined the cast, was less rapturously received. It was also overshadowed by reports that material shot by its British director, Andrea Arnold, had been recut against her wishes by producers and editors, Vallée among them, to bring the series more in line with its predecessor.

Vallée’s upcoming projects included a film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and an adaptation for television of Zack McDermott’s book Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love, about a lawyer who is admitted to a psychiatric hospital after suffering a breakdown. “I have a thing for underdogs, where they’ve got to put up a fight to find their happiness and to find themselves,” he said. “I guess I had to do it, too.”

He is survived by his sons, Alex and Émile, from his marriage to the writer Chantal Cadieux; the couple divorced in 2006.