French actress Audrey Tautou, mistress of ceremony of the 66th Cannes Film Festival, poses during a photocall on the eve of the opening of the festival.
AFP/Cannes
Cannes rolled out the red carpet yesterday for Steven Spielberg, head of this year’s film festival jury, with the legendary moviemaker dining with his fellow judges on the eve of the 12-day Riviera movie fest.
Spielberg, who arrived mid-afternoon at his seafront hotel, was meeting jury members including Nicole Kidman, Ang Lee and Christoph Waltz at a two Michelin star restaurant for a meal prepared by top chef Christian Sinicropi.
Audrey Tautou, the host of today’s opening ceremony, took part in her first photo call, looking demure in a yellow floral-patterned summer dress.
Famously self-effacing, the French actress was catapulted to international stardom in 2001 with the surprise global success Amelie.
Tautou said she discovered she had been chosen as the maitresse de ceremonies by text message.
“The offer threw me off balance a bit. I was immediately touched, but torn between wanting to accept and for two or three days wondering if I could do it,” she told AFP in an interview.
“In the end I refused to allow myself to be ruled by fear,” she added.
Tautou caught the world’s imagination in Amelie as the meddlesome pixie-faced waitress from Montmartre.
She went on to star with Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code in 2006 but has since largely shunned Hollywood in favour of French films.
The city and festival venue were putting the last-minute touches to the film extravaganza which is the yearly highlight of the Riviera resort.
A huge festival poster of Paul Newman embracing his actress wife Joanne Woodward adorned the front of the Palais des Festivals, which dominates Cannes’ palm-fringed sea front.
Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling and Alain Delon are among the stars expected for the May 15-26 fest.
Dozens of events were also planned at hotels, luxury villas and private beaches around the town including a Gatsby-themed dance for 800 locals.
Although most stars only stay one or two nights, hotels pride themselves on being able to respond to any request no matter how eccentric.
Security was also expected to be particularly tight this year in the wake of the Boston bomb attacks.
The festival will open tonight with the European premiere of Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.
The Roaring Twenties costume drama stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby and British actress Carey Mulligan as his love interest Daisy.
Unusually for Cannes, the opening film will not be a world premiere. Gatsby opened last week in North America to mixed reviews but good box office.
Some critics have savaged its visual mix and soundtrack as an overlong music video that denatures F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, but others praised it for boldness.
DiCaprio’s visit to Cannes will see him treading in the footsteps of the American writer.
Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda spent a number of years in the 1920s near Cannes, where they met another American couple whose gilded life inspired his novel Tender is the Night.
Their circle included literary and artistic luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso for whom they threw lavish parties.
One villa they rented was earlier this year put on the market for over $35mn.
The Coen brothers, Roman Polanski and Steven Soderbergh are among the heavy hitters with films in competition at this year’s festival.
They will compete with a host of younger talents including Iranian director Asghar Farhadi and Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn for the coveted Palme d’Or.
Tougher times for European movies
AFP/Cannes
Europe’s top film festival opens in Cannes today to its annual show of glitz and popping champagne corks, but for many in the continent’s movie business, times are tough and likely to get tougher still.
The financial crisis that erupted in 2008 is now biting hard into state and regional subsidies and TV programming budgets that are a key support for film-making.
Added to that in some countries is the problem of rampant piracy, as people snub a trip to the cinema and instead download their films off the Internet.
“There are many clouds over movie funding,” said Eric Garandeau, head of France’s National Cinema Centre, which helps the French film industry, the biggest in Europe. “In some countries, the crisis is widespread – in some places, long-standing policies are being scrapped.”
The 12-day Cannes Film Festival will feature six French, one Italian and one Dutch film in competition. But Spain – one of the most prolific and quirky producer countries – will literally be out of the picture.
Laurent Creton, head of the Paris-based Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Research (IRCAV), says the mood of belt tightening has played an important if indirect role in reducing output. He is especially worried for the long-term impacts.
“You can’t make an automatic association between austerity and movie-making capacity,” he said in an interview. “But in today’s tough economic climate, companies start to go out of business, which is a threat to the skills base.”
In debt-wracked Spain, aid to the movie industry slumped from 123mn euros ($160mn) in 2010 to 55mn euros this year – and cinema admissions have been whacked by a rise in value-added tax from 8% to 21%.
“If we don’t find new sources of income, many movie projects will be shelved, and it will be a great loss for cultural creativity in Europe,” said the president of the Spanish cinemas federation, Juan Ramon Gomez Fabra.
A leading independent distributor, Alta Films, recently filed for bankruptcy, a development that the French Association of Film Exporters (Adef), which sells French movies to its neighbour, said was a tragedy.
Adef took aim at two perceived causes: what it described as a “lack of Spanish political support” for the cinema, and decisions by state and private TV channels to stop buying “auteur” films, meaning movies that are made by marginal or provocative directors.
Italy is another big film maker where austerity is starting to bite: state aid this year has been cut by 4mn euros to 72.4mn, unleashing a howl of pain from the national association of cinematographic and audiovisual industries, ANICA.
In Germany, 13 professional groups in the movie industry last month issued a joint appeal to the state channels ARD and ZDF to allocate 3.5% of their combined income from TV licences of 7bn euros to making feature-length movies.
The trend in financing “points to fewer films being supported, not more”, said Bettina Reitz, in charge of programming with the Bavarian network BR.
France, according to Garandeau, “still has the privilege” of strong financing, although the cash-strapped state required CNC to repay 50mn euros last year, followed by 150mn in the 2013 fiscal year.
French TV financing in movie-making fell by 5.4% last year; the state-run France Televisions, which runs a group of national TV networks, will reduce its movie investment by 3mn euros this year to 57mn euros.
The big exception is Britain, which last year had a huge success with the James Bond movie Skyfall, which notched up world box office of more than $1bn.
The industry contributes £4.6bn ($7bn) to the economy, employing 117,000 people today, compared with 100,000 in 2009. But it is also an industry that is supported by the state – and royalty, too, for the Queen hosted a bash for it at Windsor Castle in April, which helped smooth the way to a deal for Pinewood Studios in the making of the seventh episode of Star Wars.
Despite this success, Britain fails as a nurturing ground of films that are socially or artistically challenging, said leftwing British director Ken Loach.
“American commercial films dominate and monopolise the market so it’s very hard, and people struggle as best they can and they try to get this tax relief or that tax break ... but it’s very meagre and the critical thing is we don’t have access to our screens,” he said in an interview. “The screens are dominated by the American industry commercial films and the cartels operate ... if you make an independent British film it’s very hard to get a screen presence.”
