More than any other festival, I think, Cannes engages with its directors and their careers in symbiotic, mutually productive ways. Narratives build over time. Directors might make a film or two and be rejected, and then, perhaps, play in Un Certain Regard before “graduating” to the C...
Expand postEditor’s Letter
More than any other festival, I think, Cannes engages with its directors and their careers in symbiotic, mutually productive ways. Narratives build over time. Directors might make a film or two and be rejected, and then, perhaps, play in Un Certain Regard before “graduating” to the Competition. Certain directors are perennial favorites, appearing frequently in the official selection so that when a film doesn’t arrive there, but plays Venice or Toronto instead, it’s a whispered-about rejection. A Cannes premiere offers not only prestige but business advantage. It’s the best place to launch a film for international media and introduce it to foreign buyers.
So, it’s significant, then, that three big American auteurs with films in Competition are all repeat visitors with acquisition titles. Paul Schrader first arrived in Cannes in 1976 as the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, which won the Palme d’Or. As a director he had three films there in the ’80s and early ’90s (Mishima, Patty Hearst and The Comfort of Strangers) before the long break leading to his current Oh, Canada. Francis Ford Coppola won the Palme d’Or with The Conversation in 1974, and he’s now back with Megalopolis. David Cronenberg has had six films play in Competition, beginning with Crash, in 1996, which won a jury prize. He’s there this year with The Shrouds, a film that’s been divisive yet sits in the top tier of the Moiree critic’s grid, where our correspondents, Vadim Rizov and Blake Williams, have been posting their scores.
Cronenberg’s and Schrader’s films (and probably the Coppola) are “late works,” notes Rizov in his reviews today. The term isn’t just one that speaks about age and career but about certain formal attitudes and the positioning of the work. Used most notably by Theodor Adorno in an essay about Beethoven’s final works, “late style,” writes Edward Said, signifies “a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works are a form of exile from his milieu.” Or, as the late great David Bordwell, whose memorial was this week wrote in another formulation, “Are the late works of a given filmmaker greater than those what came before? Does age confer wisdom or philosophical resignation or a fear of mortality or some other kind of new understanding that is reflected in artworks in a stylistic or thematic fashion, creating a distinctive late period?” (The two Godard titles also sit at the very top of the Moiree grid — truly late works.)
As a Cannes watcher, it’s exciting to see directors you love enter the Cannes fold. Sean Baker, as good a representative of a true American independent film director as any, first screened in Cannes with his sixth feature, The Florida Project, which was the cover of our 25th anniversary issue, and then screened his following Red Rocket there. But his current film, Anora, is his first in Competition, and it’s one I’m extremely looking forward to seeing. Sean’s had a fascinating career trajectory, which began with a more conventional feature and saw him working in TV before honing the kind of adrenalized social realism he’s become known for. (About that career, check out my first interview with him about his Starlet, which digs into his early days quite a bit.)
This year, excitingly, a number of young American independents have landed in Critics Week and Directors Fortnight, which means, in addition to the laurels they can add to their posters, they are now building relationships with the sales agents and foreign buyers who, they hope, will support future work. Last week in this space I told you to look out for the work of Omnes Films, the L.A.-based production collective we featured in our 25 New Faces list in 2021. They’ve made a rapid ascent since, with two films — Tyler Taormina’s Christmas in Miller’s Point and Carson Lund’s Eephus — in Directors Fortnight, which is kind of extraordinary. In addition to separately interviewing Taormina (and with Leonardo Goi interviewing Lund), I interviewed the two of them together about the collective (I can’t formally call it a company because there’s no LLC), how they operate and how they may decide to leverage their Cannes cred going forward. One way is to double down on their commitment to the feature form. “We’re very preoccupied with making personal arthouse features,” Lund says, “These are not writerly films, and we’re not interested, per se, in graduating to episodic TV comedy.” With the tailwinds of Cannes, and their talent, that focus should serve them well, and I look forward to seeing them in Competition a few films from now.
Elsewhere on the site, Peter Rinaldi has on his Back to One podcast a really refreshing interview with Nell Tiger Free, star of Apple TV+’s Servant as well as The First Omen. As a producer or director you don’t have to be a full-on “actors should be treated like cattle” Hitchcock-type to sometimes feel less connected to the more woo-woo discussions of an actor’s craft. If that’s you, then this interview is a lot of fun as Free describes her no-process process, which comes down to “just saying the words.” And newsletter compatriot Brian Newman has an essential post this week geared less to those making personal arthouse features and more to everyone not on the Cannes trajectory and having to hustle to build an audience and find distribution.
See you next week.
Best,
Scott Macaulay
Did you go to Cannes this year with a film or as an observer to suss out the mechanics of the Festival and the Marché du Film?
Is there anything you can share with us about your experience, that will help members of the Stage32 community navigate Cannes, who may wish to go in future years?
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Geoff Hall Cannes seems like it's the place to be to network in the industry. I love the diversity of films that come out of this festival. One time, I think the impression was indy (like that was a b...
Expand commentGeoff Hall Cannes seems like it's the place to be to network in the industry. I love the diversity of films that come out of this festival. One time, I think the impression was indy (like that was a bad thing), but now I think Cannes has become maybe more mainstream than Hollywood.