Matt Dillon Talks Locarno Lifetime Achievement Award, Lars Von Trier’s Best Advice & Releasing Music Doc ‘The Great Fellove’

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Matt Dillon is at Locarno this week where he will receive the festival’s lifetime achievement award, a prestigious honour that he joked comes with a unique balance of positives and negatives.“I’m too young,” he said. “But I do this because hopefully there’s some director here that’s gonna say ‘good job’ because I’m only as good as the directors I work with.”This year, in tribute to Dillon, the festival will screen Gus Van Sant’s 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy, for which Dillon won his first of two Indie Spirit Awards as well as his directorial debut City Of Ghosts starring James Caan, Gérard Depardieu, and Stellan Skarsgård.“I made that film on celluloid and now nobody makes movies on celluloid anymore.

Everything is happening so fast,” he said.For his latest project, Dillon has returned to the director’s seat for the first time in 17 years to produce an expansive documentary on the life and career of Cuban singer-songwriter Francisco Fellove, who is best known for his particular style of scat singing known as chua chua.The documentary, titled The Great Fellove, charts how Dillon and his friend Joey Altruda traveled to Mexico City in the late 1990s to meet Fellove, who had long retreated from the limelight, and to record a final album with him.

Dillon unearthed that footage after it had spent many years on the shelf, and decided to flesh it out into a feature film, travelling to Cuba and Mexico and recording interviews with many of Fellove’s contemporaries to understand how much he influenced their musical scene.The Great Fellove debuted at the San Sebastian Film Festival in 2020 and went on to play several festivals including Telluride, the Woodstock Film Festival, and the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico,