The Talk of Toronto Film Fest : Movies: Director Jean-Claude Lauzon’s ‘Leolo’ plays to an enthusiastic audience on opening night.

TORONTO —  After his first film, “Night Zoo,” received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival five years ago, French Canadian writer-director Jean-Claude Lauzon went out into the street to find blocked traffic and more applause. He literally pinched himself. But it didn’t help.

“I said to myself,” he remembers, “ ‘This is not the answer to your anxieties.’ I always thought it would be like climbing a hill, at some point you reach the top and start going down. People are waving, things get easier. It’s not working like that. Success doesn’t change anything about anxiety.”

Whether it changes anything or not, even greater success has come to Lauzon with his new film, the extraordinary “Leolo,” which opened Toronto’s prestigious Festival of Festivals Thursday night, the first of 335 films from 42 countries to be shown during the 10-day event. Called “85% autobiographical” by its director, this story of a creative child growing up in an unforgiving environment won’t be released in the United States until February, but it has already caused a sensation wherever it’s been shown. Fiercely adventurous in spirit, a visual revelation, it is heartbreaking as well as wise, a magical fever dream of imagination, poetry and love. And, like Lauzon himself, it is a creation of powerful--almost frightening--candor.

“I have a problem keeping my mouth shut. I’m always saying what I’m thinking,” Lauzon says, dressed all in black and speaking (what else but) candidly. “I don’t know if it’s a good way to make a career, but I’m alive and I want people to notice it.”

Having grown up like his title character in a tough section of Montreal, the 38-year-old Lauzon is “so used to being involved with very, very rough people that even when I’m not so angry people think I’m going to stab them with a knife. If I pump up even a little bit, everyone believes I’m going to punch them. It’s a habit I took when I was young.”

His compulsion to say just what is on his mind has led Lauzon into some very public run-ins. When a prominent producer-director sent him a script to consider, he called it “an idiot test” and asked to see the real thing. He compromised “Leolo’s” chances for a prize at Cannes, where it was in competition, by making an off-the-wall remark (“some silly stuff”) to juror Jamie Lee Curtis, and then considerably irritated (“He almost punched me”) another juror on the plane out of Cannes.

Yet to see Lauzon only this way, as a director knows more than anyone, is to seriously misjudge him. “People like you to be either a clean white hero or a very hard, dark rebel,” he says, repelled by the false simplicity. Lauzon in fact is as sensitive as he is intense, a dazzling, talented filmmaker who finds creativity agonizing and is forever second-guessing his evident ability.

“I am very compulsive, obsessive about my work. I am writing almost in a state of trance,” he explains in accented English. “When I began writing ‘Leolo,’ I didn’t know where the film was going. I didn’t know what the movie was about, only how I wanted people to feel about it when it was over. I was so afraid, I was crying. And when I am on the set, each image, each color, each detail obsesses me. If you tell me I can’t have a towel this color, I stop breathing.

“My biggest problem,” Lauzon continues, “is to believe I have talent. I truly do not believe I’m an artist, I think it’s something that can leave you. I would be so happy to be an Olympic athlete, to be able to run and then check the chronometer each morning about the quality of your work. I don’t know how I did ‘Leolo’ and I worry I won’t be able to do it again.”

Part of Lauzon’s ambivalence and insecurity seems to come from his impoverished working-class background. He quit school and left home at age 16, platonically adopted by a group of “tough gay guys, a very violent crowd,” working at odd jobs, and dreaming only of “owning a motorcycle and repeating ‘Easy Rider.’ ”

Before he had left school, however, something he had written for teacher Jean-Guy Major ended up in the hands of National Film Board of Canada member Andre Petrowski, both of whom spent a year trying to track Lauzon down. “When Petrowski found me he said, ‘In 15 years you’re going to be either very well-known or in a psychiatric hospital.’ ”

Lauzon was at first unimpressed with his would-be mentor. “I thought, ‘It’s another one coming around to see the cutie of 17. If he is idiot enough to love me, he is going to regret it for the rest of his life.’ ” Petrowski persevered, however, eventually getting Lauzon back in school, interesting him in film, and serving as the inspiration for the Word-Tamer, one of “Leolo’s” major characters.

Yet even though he went on to win awards, Lauzon, with intense interests in everything from scuba-diving to flying, was never your average film student. He studied for a time at AFI in Los Angeles, but left early (and asked for his money back, when he became involved with a man named Tom Jennings who was designing a revolutionary bow and arrow for hunting, which became yet another of his passions).

“Night Zoo,” Lauzon’s first feature, which nervily combined a cops-and-robbers plot with a troubled father-son relationship that paralleled the director’s own, had to search four years for financing and ended up winning an unprecedented 13 Genies, the Canadian Academy Award. That led to a lot of feelers from Hollywood, a town Lauzon soon came to feel he was constitutionally unsuited for.

“They sent me all these boring scripts,” he remembers, still disbelieving. “I met with an important producer who said to me, ‘Young man, you have to understand, here you don’t have a name. You will have to make a little film first.’ I said, ‘I won’t make a little pile of crap and make a big pile later.’ The man got up and left, he didn’t even finish his berries. The mercenary part of me feared it was the last time anyone would pay attention to me, but my soul was saying there was something deeply wrong with my taking this path.”

Getting “Leolo” financed was even more problematical, and Lauzon, working with a producer named Bahman Farmanara who was passionate about the script, even considered filming it in English. But when Pierre-Henri Deleau, head of the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, heard about this, he told the pair, “If you ever shoot this film in English, I’m going to kill you both. This script belongs to the French people, and Jean-Claude owes this movie to his mother.”

When he talks about his films, as when he talks about almost everything else, Jean-Claude Lauzon is nothing if not conflictive. On the one hand he believes in films that offer “a serious emotional experience, so that when you come out of the theater, you don’t want to talk to anybody, you’re on your knees for the next 20 minutes.” But, on the other hand, he is troubled by how much making films like that takes out of him personally.

“After my movies,” he says impishly, “people are not coming out and eating from the buffet. I want them to eat from the buffet, I’m always wanting to write nice stuff, so beautiful women will approach me afterwards. I prefer to write easier stuff, I don’t want to go through this crap anymore, but these images obsess me. I didn’t want to make a movie about kids, I didn’t want to be talking about poor people. But when I was sitting down to write, there is something, images recurring, a wave coming back.”

What is in him must come out, and though Lauzon smiles and says, “Maybe you’ll see me in L.A. one day, making this kind of easy film,” no one believes him, least of all the director himself.