It’s the big Cannes question — what will catch Steven Spielberg’s eye?
The king of Hollywood heads the jury that will decide who wins the Palme d’Or and other prizes at the French Riviera film fest, and artistic director Thierry Fremaux can’t wait to find out what takes his fancy.
“We know (Spielberg) the director, but we don’t know who he will be as a spectator,” Fremaux said Tuesday.
“Take the two Japanese films” in competition. Will the director of “Jaws,” ”E.T.” and “Saving Private Ryan” root for Takashi Miike’s action-packed crime drama “Shield of Straw” or for Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s intimate family story “Like Father, Like Son.”
“I still don’t know what he will prefer: the action film, which is more similar to his own cinema, or the auteur film that is completely different,” said Fremaux, who has overseen the festival since 2001.
Spielberg did drop a hint, however. Fremaux said Spielberg told him that on the jury “I want to make a journey. I want to know how people make cinema in a different way than mine.”
Spielberg and his fellow jurors — who include actors Nicole Kidman and Christoph Waltz and director Ang Lee — were gathering for introductory cocktails Tuesday, as a small army of workers erected signs, touched up paintwork and readied the red carpet outside the festival’s main venue, the Palais des Cinemas.
The film extravaganza opens Wednesday with Baz Luhrmann’s jazz-age extravaganza “The Great Gatsby,” and runs to May 27.
The 20 contenders for the Palme d’Or include new movies from the Coen brothers, Roman Polanski, Alexander Payne and Asghar Farhadi.
It’s notoriously difficult to predict the winner, but some things at Cannes are guaranteed. There will be sand. There will be sun — despite a forecast of rain for the opening night. And, Fremaux says, there will be sex.
Asked if there’s a theme running through the selection, Fremaux suggested “love — the main theme of history.”
Films with a romantic element include Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic “Behind the Candelabra,” Abdellatif Kechiche’s coming-of-age story “La Vie d’Adele” — and possibly Farhadi’s post-divorce tale “The Past.”
Fremaux said some of the movies push boundaries in terms of the screen depiction of sex — even though times have changed since a film called “La Grande Bouffe” scandalized Cannes in 1973 with its graphic sex and nudity.
No longer quite so shocking, “La Grande Bouffe” is being screened again this year as part of the “Cannes Classics” program.
“I think society is much more open than 40 years ago and it’s more possible to talk about sexuality,” Fremaux said.
“Directors have got freedom to do what they want to do. (But) that freedom goes maybe to certain limits — so we will see.”
He said several films resonated with the debate raging in France — and elsewhere — about same-sex marriage.
“It’s a coincidence, but it’s also the directors and filmmakers and artists going inside the world, inside society,” he said. “And it’s also what Cannes wants to show.”
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More