At 26, Xavier Dolan has already written and directed five acclaimed features that have played at Toronto and Cannes, where the French Canadian rubbed shoulders with Jake Gyllenhaal and the Coen brothers on the Cannes jury. Jessica Chastain has called him her spirit animal. And yet – spirit animal or not – Dolan still can’t seem to catch a break in America.  “I don’t want to sound pretentious, but it’s puzzling,” Dolan says to the Guardian from the New York offices of Amplify Releasing, the independent distributor that’s opening his fourth film – Tom at the Farm – in the US, two years after it debuted at the Venice film festival.  Related: Tom at the Farm (Tom à la Ferme) review – 'Disorientatingly strange'  During the interim, Dolan’s fifth and most successful film, Mommy, tied with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language for the Cannes 2014 Jury prize.  This marks the second time Dolan has struggled to release his work in the US: his universally acclaimed debut, I Killed My Mother, premiered at Cannes, but took three years to find its way to American audiences.  “No one knows me in the States, because the movies have been released in such an awkward, irregular fashion, all by different distributors. There is no continuity,” he says.  Dolan says a “cluttered up” independent film landscape is to blame – one that has “very little room for foreign entries”. “It’s a complicated landscape to occupy,” he adds. “And North America does not read subtitles.”  Tom at the Farm, like everything he’s released, is in French, but it’s his first no-holds-barred thriller. Sporting unruly blond hair, Dolan plays Tom, a young Quebecois man who travels to a remote country farm for the funeral of his lover, Guillaume. Tom doesn’t divulge his identity after learning that Guillaume was in the closet his entire life, only to soon enter into a twisted, sexually charged game with his former lover’s macho brother.  Dolan is proud of the film, but worries that for many Americans, Tom at the Farm will serve as an introduction to his work. “It hurts me to think that this film will be breaking the ice [for many],” he says. “I wish my previous movies had performed well at the [US] box office, but that’s not the case.”  Related: Mommy review – outrageous and brilliant, a daytime soap from hell  Mommy, his immediate follow-up, was expected to, following a spectacular Cannes reception (the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “outrageous and brilliant”) and success in Europe. However, it failed to cross over with US audiences, earning the bulk of its (admittedly impressive) $3.5m earnings in Canada. Dolan says he’s proud of Mommy’s homegrown success, but that he still longs to connect with an audience south of the border.  “Film-making is not liberating,” he explains. “It drains a lot out of you and it’s fulfilling only temporarily. It’s a very thankless thing at times. When you’re spending all that time on a film, you don’t want 40,000 people to see it – it’s just not enough. You dream of more.”  Dolan is done taking chances. For his upcoming two projects, he’s going big.  Following Cannes jury duty in May, Dolan wrapped principal photography on It’s Only the End of the World, his first film to feature a heavyweight cast (Marion Cotillard, Lea Seydoux and Vincent Cassel).  After completing that project, he’s next slated to shoot The Death and Life of John F Donovan, his first English-language effort. Jessica Chastain and Kit Harington have already signed on: the Game of Thrones actor will play a Hollywood star whose innocent pen pal relationship with 11-year-old boy in London becomes tabloid fodder.  Dolan admits to feeling pressure for the two high-profile projects to do well commercially, once they eventually open. But he’s excited to embark on this next stage in his career.  “The stakes feel more important,” he says. “I’m not scared - I will not fail.”  Tom at the Farm opens in the US on Friday
The Canadian film-maker is one of today’s most celebrated young talents, but has yet to break into the US market. With his next project he plans to change that