CANNES DIRECTOR THIERRY FREMAUX ON THE FUTURE OF FILM FESTIVALS

To have the presence of Cannes Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux at your festival is like getting a seal of approval from the godfather of cinema himself. Arguably one of the most important players in the film industry today, Frémaux arrived by helicopter with French actress Isabelle Huppert to Emir Kusturica’s Fifth Annual Küstendorf Film and Music Festival, held this January in Serbia. “Sure Cannes is glamorous with its red carpet,” said Frémaux. “This is not the red carpet, it’s the white carpet, it’s the snow. And I think that is Emir’s style.” Küstendorf is a festival free of corporate sponsorship that aims to give back the gifts that cinema has bestowed upon Kusturica to a new generation of filmmakers, as 20 student films are screened alongside established director debuts.

When Frémaux is not running the Cannes Film Festival, he is directing the Institut Lumière in his hometown of Lyon. The museum and library honors the birthplace of cinema in Monplaisir and is dedicated to preserving the works of the Lumière brothers. He also serves as Director of the Festival Lumière in Lyon to showcase new film restorations and revivals each October.

We spoke with Frémaux at the Visconti Café at Küstendorf on the increasing importance of world film festivals in today’s market. Traditionally the goal of any new director at a film festival is to seek out distribution. As independent distribution unfortunately continues to shrink — unless you’re a filmmaker lucky enough to be working in France — film festivals may just be evolving into a very worthy substitute.

What is the relationship between Cannes and global festivals?

There are the major festivals: Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice, but the family also has a lot of small cousins and I want to pay attention to them. If Cannes can help we will, because showing the interest of Cannes helps the festivals we support.

I think that film festivals are like music festivals. A filmmaker can go for two years having 50,000-100,000 people watching his film, which is enormous. They screen the film in front of 200 people here, 500 people there. It’s like … Read the rest

LIZA JOHNSON, “RETURN”

By Brandon Harris

A low-key drama that articulates the ennui of a returning servicewoman after a tour in the Middle East, Liza Johnson’s Return strikes a delicate balance between familial melodrama and suffering vet pic. Light on exposition and heavy on expert thesping, it features a striking performance by Linda Cardellini, once the most sly and attractive of the awkward high schoolers on Freaks and Geeks, and now a fully mature screen actress making the most of her copious talents. We meet her character Kelly at the airport, freshly arrived in Ohio after a stint in an unnamed theater of war, and only slowly begin to understand the broad disconnect she has with her plumber husband (Michael Shannon) and two young girls.

Unable to adjust to life at home, she doesn’t exhibit the classic PSTD symptoms, but an underlying sense of purposelessness and dissatisfaction overcome her in their modest house and at her job in a warehouse. As her indulgences in swearing, drinking and loud rap music grow into a larger inability to maintain social affability in nearly any context and her awareness of her husband’s activities in the year she’s been away comes to fruition, Cardellini’s Kelly must figure out whether there is any longer a home to be salvaged, or simply a place as alien as the desert she may secretly yearn to get back to.

Helmer Johnson is a multi-dimensional artist who has worked as a professor and curator while making a series of acclaimed short films. Her short film South of Ten was the opening night short at the 2006 New York Film Festival, and her gallery work and installations have been exhibited at MoMA, the Walker Arts Center and the Centre Pompidou as well as major European film festivals such as the Berlinale and Rotterdam. Her feature debut Return, which had its world premiere at last year’s Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, opens this Friday.

Filmmaker: A lot of your short work features non-actors. How did the experience of working with trained performers alter your working methods?

Johnson: For the last five years … Read the rest

MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS, “THE ARTIST”

By Damon Smith

Remarkably, given the decibel-raising, sensorial overkill of our current mainstream film culture, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist—an exuberantly charming black-and-white silent melodrama about the birth of the talkies—is finding a foothold in awards season thanks to a Best Actor win at Cannes for French star Jean Dujardin, effervescent word of mouth, and the mighty muscle of the Harvey Weinstein machine. Hazanavicius, a onetime gag man for a TV comedy troupe and writer-director of the nutty James Bond spoofs OSS 117: A Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio, conceived of the film as a formal experiment that would hearken back to the Golden Age of live-orchestra-accompanied Hollywood cinema. Little did he realize what a welcome the film would receive from audiences around the world (I saw The Artist in a packed-to-the-rafters opera house in Doha, Qatar) who’ve embraced the pure spirit of his traditional tale, rendered in an obsolete format. The film centers on Douglas Fairbanks–esque silent-film star George Valentin (Dujardin), a happy-go-lucky, supremely confident actor whose career stalls when the sound era arrives, sending him into a tailspin. Locked in a loveless marriage with Doris (Penelope Ann Miller), he falls for Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a wanna-be starlet whose transformation into the marquee-topping darling of studio boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) heightens Valentin’s sense of dejection. Only his utterly devoted dog (a scene-stealing Jack Russell who won a Palm Dog at Cannes, alongside his co-star) and loyal driver Clifton (James Cromwell) remain faithful friends as Valentin slips further into obscurity and depression. The Artist delights on many levels—as a love story, as an homage to cinematic tradition, complete with a rousing, show-closing dance sequence—and with any luck, may renew interest in the silent era with its show-biz flair,  moody musings on craft, and contagious enthusiasm for bygone times.

Filmmaker spoke with Hazanavicius about the virtues of silence and classical Hollywood, full-bodied choreography and canine talent wranglers. The Weinstein Company opens The Artist in theaters Friday.

Filmmaker: On the heels of your rapturous premiere at Cannes, there has been an enthusiastic international response to The Artist.… Read the rest

AKI KAURISMÄKI, “LE HAVRE”

By Damon Smith

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, published in 2003, critic and film historian David Thomson ends his favorable entry on Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki by noting that the Helsinki-based auteur might gain some edge if “his sardonic eye turned to politics.” It’s hard to imagine what a political film by Kaurismäki might look like, given how masterfully he has balanced deadpan humor and dour heartbreak in his wry tales of social estrangement among the working classes; films like The Match Factory Girl and Ariel feel more like poetic, strangely poignant chamber works. But now, at least in spirit, we have one. Kaurismäki’s latest comic fable, Le Havre, which won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in May and is Finland’s official Oscar entry, channels some of Europe’s not-so-welcoming attitudes toward newly arrived immigrants and transforms the conflict into an amiably humanistic fairy tale resonating with goodwill.

Septuagenarian Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a former artist, lives with his wife Arletty (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen) in the titular French port city where he makes a bare living shining shoes at the train station and frequents a neighborhood bar patronized by shiftless, long-haired men. Nearby, port authorities pry open a storage container on the docks and discover a group of Gabonese immigrants hiding inside, apparently bound for Britain. One of them, a boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), escapes mustachioed police inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and crosses paths with Marcel, who hospitably takes him in and then attempts to locate his family in London. When Monet begins to suspect the elder man is illegally housing Idrissa, Marcel enlists the help of neighborhood acquaintances and shopkeepers to shield the boy until he can make arrangements for his safe passage to England. Meanwhile, Arletty is diagnosed with a terminal illness after some routine hospital tests but decides not to tell her husband, hoping for the best. Slight in design but emotionally potent, Le Havre carries all of Kaurismäki’s quirky trademarks: mordant one-liners and mannered acting, absurd exchanges and static shots of comically immobile characters reacting impassively to extraordinary occurrences. But this time, the sadsack … Read the rest

NICOLAS WINDING REFN, “DRIVE”

By Brandon Harris

“Riveting” is an adjective quite frequently used by entertainment journalists when describing crime movies, thrillers, or really anything that might simply offer its fair share of violent and shocking surprises. After seeing Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, however, one must reevaluate this clear over usage. Refn’s film, for which he took home the Cannes Best Director prize, brings fresh meaning to the term as it regards to narrative cinema. I must emphasize: this is an absolutely engrossing entertainment, surely one of the most potent and unforgettably propulsive stories you’ll encounter on a silver screen this year. A simple recap of its story will probably leave you unenthralled, as, in its broadest outlines, Drive is but another modern neo-noir with a tough, taciturn hero (a stunt driver by day, a getaway driver by night) caught in a moral conundrum with some very bad men. Yet as you’ll see in the following conversation with its 40-year-old director, Drive‘s simplicity, its embrace of the mythic and the familiar, combined with Refn and his very fine cabal of actors’ abundance of craft, (a brilliant Ryan Gosling, ably supported by Bryan Cranston, Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Ron Perlman and the indispensable Albert Brooks in his best supporting turn since Out of Sight) has led to something quite special.

Refn burst onto the international film scene at 24 with his Danish dope-dealing flick Pusher, which spawned an entire trilogy now celebrated by genre cinema dorks the world over. His reputation solidified with 2009′s Bronson, about the notorious British criminal Michael Gordon Petersen, who received seven years in prison for robbing a Post Office. Because of his various hijinks behind bars, he ended up spending 30 years in solitary confinement. Refn followed up Bronson’s success by reuniting with Pusher collaborator (and erstwhile Bond villain) Mads Mikkelsen for the medieval action pic Valhalla Rising, but seems geared toward an entirely new level of recognition and box office success with his latest, which while recalling the noir traditions, William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. and the … Read the rest

PRESCREEN ANNOUNCES CALL FOR ENTRIES

By Scott Macaulay

While in Cannes this year I moderated a panel on new distribution thinking, and one of the panelists was Shawn Bercuson of PreScreen. I wrote:

… PreScreen’s business operates on an entirely different principle. Using a targeted email approach similar to GroupOn’s, PreScreen blasts fans with invites to watch films via secured streaming before their theatrical release. Then, says Bercuson, detailed information flows to the filmmakers regarding the demographics of the audience who responded to the invites. This information can help in the further crafting of marketing, or the digital release can simply generate good old word-of-mouth. PreScreen, which promises to bring you “one new movie a day,” expects to launch in a few weeks.

Well, those few weeks are up, and PreScreen has just announced a call for entries. Visit their site , learn more about the service and, if you’re interested, submit your film to be one of their first. … Read the rest

VIRTUE AND VICE AT THE 2011 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Livia Bloom

Moral questions about science, war, justice, and ethics were at the forefront of some of the strongest international work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

“He’s really not judgmental of his characters at all, is he?” said one party-goer of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Between bites of warm peaches and pistachio ice cream at a reception for the filmmaker’s sleek, stylish new thriller, The Skin I Live In, party-goers discussed the dark, unsettling tale of a mad scientist (played with panache by Antonio Banderas) who develops a miraculous new variety of human skin and a fraught relationship with his sad, beautiful Frankenstein (Elena Anaya). Although he has never won the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or, which this year went to Terrance Malick for The Tree of Life, Almódovar remains a perennial favorite here. As the director and his flamboyant entourage made their way into the Lumière Theater, accompanied by Banderas performing a toreador’s moves up the red carpet, the crowd gave them a standing ovation, followed by another one after the screening. The Skin I Live In boasts striking visual settings: an impossibly long staircase lined with fine art leads to a secret chambers; a science laboratory is a glass cube set in an ancient cellar of arching brickwork, and the woods outside a wedding looks like a tangled, primeval garden of earthly delights. It’s the kind of imagery that would ordinarily be associated with on-set cinematography, but Almodóvar shot the film on location in Spain, adding modern elegance to a gender-bending and morality-challenging story that calls into question what it means to take justice into all-too-human hands.

A tiny town is on the verge of being split down the middle between Muslims and Christians in director Nadine Labaki‘s warm-hearted second feature film, Where Do We Go Now? Yet the Lebanese filmmaker, who also plays one of the film’s leading roles, takes a open-minded approach to their conflict. Humorous and warm, with the occasional musical number thrown in, the film follows the story of the creative efforts by the townswomen to keep their men from violent conflict at all costs. Whether it means midnight sabotage against … Read the rest

FILMNATION’S GLEN BASNER @ CANNES

For the three-year-old FilmNation, the 2011 Cannes Film Festival is a big deal. That’s not just because the company’s market slate is substantial, containing projects by Terrence Malick, John Hillcoat and, as executive producer, James Cameron, but because the young New York-based sales and production company has, for the first time, two films in the festival. The company is repping both Pedro Almodovar’s latest Competition title, The Skin I Live In (pictured above), as well as American indie Jeff Nichol’s Sundance hit, Take Shelter, screening in the Critics Week section.

FilmNation was launched by international sales veteran Glen Basner just three years ago in the months following the financial crisis. It’s grown from its early days with three people in a room to a large staff in an airy Chelsea office space. And, coming off sales for Oscar-winning The King’s Speech, it’s still in a growth mode, producing projects through a production arm headed by producer Aaron Ryder.

I sat down with CEO Basner a couple of weeks before Cannes to discuss FilmNation, the business of international sales, and where the market may, or may not be, going. At the time, the company hadn’t finalized its Cannes slate. Check this space towards the end of the festival for a round two covering FilmNation’s experience at the festival this year.

FILMMAKER: You’re a veteran who has been going to Cannes for many years. I’m sure there’s a certain routine that you know very well. But there must also be an unpredictable element. What is unpredictable about Cannes this year? What question is looming in your head about the market, or about the films?

Basner: At this point, we’re trying to what sense what the market will be in terms of new films. This year a lot of films are coming late to market, including our own, so that’s really a big question mark. [The market] will give us a sense of where we can push, where we need to pull back, where we think we can achieve success, and where we think we may have some issues.… Read the rest

CANNES: FILMS I’M HOPING WILL WORK ME INTO A (SCENTLESS) SWEAT

By Howard Feinstein

The Australian-born critic Shane Danielsen wrote an amusing piece for Indiewire about this year’s Berlin Film Festival. He compared the smell outside some of the screening rooms to that of sperm. I remember it being stinky, but not that particular odor. Shane is, however, a reliable source.

One of two things at Cannes that really gets on my nerves is the smell inside the press screenings, especially those that take place at 8:30 a.m. The 5000-seat theater is packed. No pun intended, but these projections are the pits, the lower depths of hygiene. Maybe it’s time constraints or perhaps cultural practices, but you pray for the manna of soap and toothpaste. Attendees tend to be part of the Great Unwashed; an asthmatic who showers once a day, I feel like one of the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

The other annoyance is of a different vein: the pretense of colleagues who don’t refer to films by name, but by director. For example, Melancholia is spoken of as the von Trier. Then there are the Almodovar, the Bilge Ceylan, the Kim Ki-duk, and the van Sant. They don’t call some of the super lightweight movies showing this year the Rob Marshall or the Jodie Foster: in the context of Cannes, they get names: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and The Beaver, respectively.

Like almost every critic, I’ll see the first group, the the films, anyway; it’s almost a necessity. The ones that I’m most looking forward to, however, lie somewhere between those and the films that are called by their titles, if that. These are works by directors much lower on the festival hierarchy and not yet considered to be of the status, or lesser-known filmmakers whose names and titles are both unknown, but whose previous efforts have shown promise. Some of them are the possible surprises that I’m most looking forward to seeing, even if I have to hold my nose in the process.

Competition

The Source / Radu Mihaileanu / France

Mihaileanu epitomizes the Jewish worldview: Life is simultaneously tragic and … Read the rest

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL, “RABBIT HOLE”

Originally posted online on December 16, 2010. Rabbit Hole is nominated for Best Actress (Nicole Kidman).

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Rabbit Hole might seem like an odd choice for helmer John Cameron Mitchell, a director whose reputation wasn’t gained built on tasteful, upper-middle-class family dramas. Perhaps he’s mellowed, and given the results, why not? The film’s story of parental grief, that of a Westchester County couple (Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman) who, eight months later still lack the emotional wherewithal to deal with the accidental death of their young son, may seem like the stuff of so many Lifetime Channel weepies. But in the hands of this 47-year-old writer, actor and director, it’s a surprisingly understated and buoyant glimpse at the aftermath of personal tragedy. Shirking off the baroque directorial flourishes of Hedwig and the Angry Itch (2001) and the untethered, sexually adventurous performances of Shortbus (2006), Mitchell takes a headlong dive into movie star corralling in Rabbit Hole, and in the process elicits a surprisingly dexterous performance from Kidman and fascinating supporting turns from Sandra Oh and Dianne Wiest.

An army brat turned musical-theater wunderkind, Mitchell studied at Northwestern’s theater school in the early to mid ’80s before cutting his teeth in the Chicago theater world and network television as an actor. He won an Obie for the stage version of Hedwig in 1998, before hatching a film version three years later that won him Sundance’s best director prize and a Golden Globe nomination. He quickly became a cause célèbre, a new standard bearer for indie cinema’s transgender niche, a notion that was broadened by his even more provocative follow up, Short Bus. While his newest project will surely lead to yet another reevaluation of this gifted and beguiling stage dynamo-turned-auteur, a strong throughline of personal storytelling and project-driven aesthetic choices have quickly become his calling cards.

Rabbit Hole opens this Friday.

Filmmaker: When, if ever, did you see Rabbit Hole on stage? Did you see making this film as an opportunity to return to your roots in theater?

Mitchell: Funny thing, I … Read the rest