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.”
“Mickey 17” Tops Weekend Box Office, But Profitability Is A Long Way Off
"Parasite" filmmaker Bong Joon Ho's original science fiction film "Mickey 17" opened in first place on the North American box office charts. According to studio estimates Sunday, the Robert Pattinson-led film earned $19.1 million in its first weekend in theaters, which was enough to dethrone "Captain America: Brave New World" after a three-week reign.
Overseas, "Mickey 17" has already made $34.2 million, bringing its worldwide total to $53.3 million. But profitability for the film is a long way off: It cost a reported $118 million to produce, which does not account for millions spent on marketing and promotion.
A week following the Oscars, where "Anora" filmmaker Sean Baker made an impassioned speech about the importance of the theatrical experience – for filmmakers to keep making movies for the big screens, for distributors to focus on theatrical releases and for audiences to keep going – "Mickey 17" is perhaps the perfect representation of this moment in the business, or at least an interesting case study. It's an original film from an Oscar-winning director led by a big star that was afforded a blockbuster budget and given a robust theatrical release by Warner Bros., one of the few major studios remaining. But despite all of that, and reviews that were mostly positive (79% on RottenTomatoes), audiences did not treat it as an event movie, and it may ultimately struggle to break even.
Originally set for release in March 2024, Bong Joon Ho's follow-up to the Oscar-winning "Parasite" faced several delays, which he has attributed to extenuating circumstances around the Hollywood strikes. Based on the novel "Mickey7" by Edward Ashton, Pattinson plays an expendable employee who dies on missions and is re-printed time and time again. Steven... Read More