page_title: The Decline of the American Empire
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: The Decline of the American Empire / Production / Development
caption_attribution_description: Denys Arcand at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival
context_page_description: The Decline of the American Empire is a 1986 Canadian sex comedy-drama film directed by Denys Arcand and starring Rémy Girard, Pierre Curzi and Dorothée Berryman. The film follows a group of intellectual friends from the Université de Montréal history department as they engage in a long dialogue about their sexual affairs, touching on issues of adultery, homosexuality, group sex, BDSM and prostitution. A number of characters associate self-indulgence with societal decline.
  The film was a box office success in Canada and internationally and received good reviews. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, nine Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture, and was the first Canadian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was followed by two sequels, The Barbarian Invasions in 2003 and Days of Darkness in 2007.
context_section_description: In the wake of the 1980 Quebec referendum, director Denys Arcand felt Quebec's interests had shifted from politics to "individual pleasures", and with a small budget of $800,000 for his next project, envisioned a dialogue-heavy film like Louis Malle's 1981 film My Dinner with Andre. Arcand viewed sex as the most likely topic that could sustain audience interest for an entire film. He worked on the screenplay throughout the summer of 1984, under the working title Conversations scabreuses. He chose tenured university professors as his subject matter because he felt that such people had less of a Quebecois accent, which would make the film more accessible to French-speaking audiences around the world. He avoided naming local places for the same reason, even though this went against the wishes of the National Film Board of Canada, which co-sponsored the film.
  As Arcand worked on the script, producer Roger Frappier saw the story as promising and lobbied René Malo to co-produce, allowing for a bigger budget. Frappier and Malo raised $1.8 million, allowing for more settings depicted in the film. Most of the funding came from the governments of Canada and Quebec.
  Arcand had Rémy Girard and Yves Jacques in mind for principal roles after working with them on The Crime of Ovide Plouffe (Le Crime d'Ovide Plouffe) (1984), and named the main character Rémy after Girard. Nevertheless, their lack of celebrity meant Girard had to audition for the part named for him, to satisfy producers.
caption: Director Denys Arcand wrote the script influenced by a small budget and seeing an interest in personal pleasures as becoming predominant in society.
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