Baz's Gatsby gets gala Cannes opening

The films' stars Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan and Leonardo pose with director Baz Luhrmann as they arrive for the screening at the Cannes Film Festival. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

IT was perhaps fitting Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby blockbuster was chosen to open this year's Cannes Film Festival, with the movie's portrayal of glitzy 1920s slotting nicely in with a real-life modern setting that is the French Riviera city.

Vintage cars brought in to flag the Aussie director's headlining lavish adaptation of the F Scott Fitzgerald novel looked almost at home alongside an assortment of modern equivalents like Ferraris thumping slowly by.

A fleet of luxury yachts and super cruisers anchored off the famous Croisette promenade adding to opulence that defies the economic crisis that plagues other European cities.

IN PICTURES: STAR-STUDDED OPENING

Dancers perform on the red carpet ahead of the screening of The Great Gatsby at the Cannes Film Festival. Picture: AFP

The opening of the 12-day film extravaganza last night was all high-powered celebrity glamour with stars of the opening film Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan and Isla Fisher getting a rousing cheer from the crowd, some of whom had stood for hours in heavy rain for a glimpse of them on the red carpet.

CANNES BOOSTED MY FILM CAREER, SAYS LUHRMANN

Even the judges of the festival this year were sought after targets for the celebrity spotters and world press photographers, but then this is the first year the likes of Hollywood heavy weights directors Steven Spielberg and Ang Lee and Nicole Kidman were called to the judging panel.

Directors Ang Lee, Steven Spielberg and actress Nicole Kidman are just some of the high-profile names on this year's judging panel for the festival. Picture: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

French actress Audrey Tautou opened the gala star-studded evening introducing a montage video clip of Spielberg's greatest movies before the famed filmmaker took to the stage for a standing ovation and prolonged applause to formally open the competition and introduce the judging panel.

But without a doubt the 66th festival is all about Gatsby.

WHICH GATSBY IS THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL?

The movie was shown to the world press earlier in the day and was met with mixed opinions, the over-the-top adaptation of a literary classic too much for some European and American critics particularly, who went as far to describe it as predictable and boring fantasy. There were many tut-tuts of disapproval from the French press too after the film was shown.

Indian actress Freida Pinto was among the celebrities at the Cannes opening screening of The Great Gatsby. Picture: AFP

But after the press screening and moments before he took to the red carpet, the Australian filmmaker Luhrmann dismissed the critics and said he never got "those high critic scores" and he only cared what audiences thought.

KERR GIVES GREAT GATSBY A BIG THUMBS UP

And apparently they think much of it where the film in the US took more than $50 million in its opening weekend last weekend.

"I knew that would come," an animated Luhrmann said when asked about the mixed reviews for his film reported to have cost more than AUD$100 million to make.

"I just care that people are going out and seeing it, I really am so moved by that."

FILM DELIVERS AUDACIOUS SOUNDTRACK

Cannes is more celebration of film than competition. Other big name stars in Cannes are Michael Douglas and Matt Damon starring in the story of Liberace Behind the Candelabra, Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives and Emma Watson starring in The Bling Ring.

The day's top showbiz news and headlines including Steven Spielberg arrives in Cannes, Drake earns 12 nods for the BET Awards, and Christina Aguilera gets ready for a "Voice" return. Bob Mezan reports.

 

View the original article here

Cannes the birthplace of Baz

Director Baz Luhrmann and production designer partner Catherine Martin arrive at the World Premiere of The Great Gatsby on May 1 in New York. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

BAZ Luhrmann might never have gone on to direct The Great Gatsby - or anything else, for that matter - if not for the Cannes Film Festival.

"No Cannes, no me sitting here with you," Luhrmann said in a recent interview.

When Luhrmann opens the 66th Cannes Film Festival today with the international premiere of The Great Gatsby, it will be an emotional return for the Australian director. In many ways, the festival is the site of his birth as an international filmmaker.

In 1992, the 29-year-old Luhrmann had completed his first film, Strictly Ballroom, a small-budget drama about a striving, unconventional ballroom dancer in Australia, based on a play Luhrmann had developed. The film, made for $3 million, had struggled to find financing and failed to ignite interest at home. One distributor who screened it called the film, according to Luhrmann, "the worst thing he had ever seen."

"No one wanted to finance a film from Australia about ballroom dancing," recalls Craig Pearce, the co-writer of both Strictly Ballroom and Luhrmann's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby.

''They thought it was the worst idea in the world."

But as Luhrmann and his wife-to-be (and regular production designer) Catherine Martin were driving up the Australian coast "to lick our wounds," Luhrmann got a call from Cannes offering the film a spot in the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar. The category recognises young talent and encourages daring works.

Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. Picture: AP/Warner Bros

Fate had interrupted and Luhrmann was en route to the most prestigious film festival in the world.

"That moment it opens, a security guard leans over and says to me, 'Monsieur, from this moment on, your life will never been the same again,' says Luhrmann, still thrilled by the memory. "That is the beginning of my life in film."

Strictly Ballroom premiered at a midnight screening.

"We're sitting there all holding hands, our hearts in our mouths," says Pearce. "It started with a couple laughs in the right places."

The Cannes audience's response grew, concluding with a lengthy standing ovation and attendees dancing in the aisles. Distributors rushed to acquire the film. Miramax landed it. The film won the Prix de la Jeunesse award (prize of the youth jury) and went on to win numerous awards from the Australian Film Institute.

Luhrmann has continued to have a close relationship with Cannes, where his Moulin Rouge starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor was the opening night film in 2002.

Some eyebrows were raised when Cannes announced The Great Gatsby, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, as an opener despite hitting the screens five days earlier in North America.

But for Luhrmann, bringing Gatsby to Cannes (near where Fitzgerald, a noted visitor to the French Rivera, wrote a portion of the 1925 novel) completes a circle that began with Strictly Ballroom.

"Now I'm returning all these years later, with children, to be on the beach where not 20 miles away F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby," says Luhrmann.

"Could he have known that, in 88 years time, the book he was laboring over, probably crying over, was going to be performed in a giant palace of cinema in 3-D?"

The director thought about the unlikeliness of that journey.

"Is it a big circle? Yes, it is," Luhrmann declared.

View the original article here

Cannes to showcase Gatsby, Gosling

Leonardo DiCaprio with Carey Mulligan in Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby. Source: Supplied

FOR even those most accustomed to the frenzy of celebrity, the Cannes Film Festival can be a disorienting experience.

For 12 days every year, the French Rivera resort town turns into one giant seaside swirl of glamour, high art and backroom deal-making. Like some sun-drenched phantasm, all of cinema comes alive in Cannes: its serious ambitions, bottom-line commerce and crass spectacle.

"Every time I go to Cannes, it feels like I'm entering the helicopter scene in La Dolce Vita," says Leonardo DiCaprio. "It's an insane experience. The entire town is turned into a red carpet. Every hotel is a premiere. But at the same time, it is the mecca for the world to celebrate filmmaking and bold filmmaking."

This year's Cannes, the 66th, kicks off Wednesday with Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, a 3-D extravaganza starring DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. In many ways, the movie's lavish, star-powered decadence epitomizes Cannes.

But by the time Luhrmann and his cast stroll down the Croisette, The Great Gatsby will have already opened in North America. Such a move by the widely respected Cannes artistic director Terry Fremaux has suggested to some perhaps a modicum of atypical desperation to lure a big, flashy film with some artistic ambitions (not always an easy thing to find these days). But it also highlights Cannes' loyalty to its favorites: Luhrmann's debut, Strictly Ballroom, premiered at Cannes, and his Moulin Rouge was also a fest opener.

Cannes remains the grandest platform for filmmakers who want to be considered among the world's elite. For studios, it's an opportunity to globally promote some of their most prized films. This year, there's a finely curated buffet of both varieties.

Several films expected to have a big presence come Oscar season will premiere at Cannes, including Alexander Payne's Nebraska, a film starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a father-son pair on a road trip. And few can top Ryan Gosling as a star attraction: His second collaboration with Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), the Bangkok noir Only God Forgives, promises to be one of the most thrillingly violent films at the festival.

Much of the world's attention will be focused on the 20 films competing for the prestigious Palme d'Or, which last year went to Michael Hanekes Amour, also a best-picture nominee at the Oscars.

The in-competition films are a typically international group, including films from Chad (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Grigris), China (Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin) and Japan (Hirokazu Koreeda's Like Father, Like Son).

Many Palme d'Or winners are returning, including the Coen brothers (1991's Barton Fink), Roman Polanski (2002's The Pianist) and Steven Soderbergh (1989's sex, lies and videotape). Joel and Ethan Coen will debut Llewyn Davis, a 1960s period film about the Greenwich Village folk scene. Polanski will premiere Venus in Fur, a French-language adaptation of the David Ives play. Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra will screen shortly before airing on HBO. It stars Michael Douglas as the flamboyant pianist Liberace and Matt Damon as his lover, Scott Thorson.

Soderbergh initially declined a spot in competition, preferring to leave a space for a young filmmaker in need of exposure. Fremaux called him a week before announcing the lineup and said that, having seen everything, Behind the Candelabra deserved to be in competition.

"The prism through which a movie is viewed when it's in competition is very different than when it's not in competition," says Soderbergh. "And I wanted to have fun. I didn't want to feel that pressure. But I don't really care now. I'm going to have fun no matter what, I've decided."

The Out of Sight and Magic Mike director says Behind the Candelabra is his last feature film, at least for a time. So Soderbergh's film career, effectively launched at Cannes in 1989, will conclude there 24 years later.

Presiding over the jury that will choose the Palme d'Or winner is Steven Spielberg, who hasn't had a film at Cannes in decades. (His Sugarland Express and E.T. both premiered at Cannes.) Speculators predict that Spielberg will either gravitate to the warm-hearted tales he's best known for, or seek to prove his more hifalutin bona fides with a more unconventional choice. (Of course, there's always the chance that he'll simply try to pick the best movie.)

But the hot house atmosphere of Cannes can obscure reactions. Films in competition are greeted with hopes, even expectations, of being a masterpiece. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is running a series throughout May titled Booed at Cannes, with films like Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (it still won the Palme) and Francois Truffaut's The Soft Skin.

Passion for movies, whether positive or negative, runs deep at Cannes. Sofia Coppola (last at Cannes with the polarizing Marie Antoinette) has experienced both sides. This year, she leads a particularly strong Un Certain Regard sidebar with The Bling Ring, a film about star-worshipping California teenagers who burglarize celebrity homes.

There's also J.C. Chandor's follow-up to his acclaimed debut Margin Call, All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford in a dialogue-less performance. And the industrious James Franco will premiere his Faulkner adaptation, As I Lay Dying.

Several notable directors will present films not in their native tongues. Regarded a possible Palme d'Or favorite, the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (the Oscar-winning A Separation) brings the French-language Le Passe, starring Berenice Bejo (The Artist). Out of competition, French actor-director Guillaume Canet makes his English language debut with Blood Ties, a New York crime film starring Clive Owen and Billy Crudup.

For much of Hollywood and the film world, Cannes is most importantly a marketplace - the biggest in the industry - where casts are assembled, financing is sought and distribution deals pursued. Last year during the festival, director James Toback documented the behind-the-scenes process as he and Alec Baldwin shuttled around hotels and yachts pitching a film.

The documentary, Seduced and Abandoned, will premiere (where else?) at this year's festival.

"It's easily the most hyperbolical and glitzily exciting festival to be at," says Toback. "There's a perfect balance between the business of movies and the making of movies. You're surrounded by every sort of person that you're likely to come up against in your film career. And you have a beautiful backdrop visually with a great sense of history on the Riviera."

"Making this film there was almost inevitable," he says. "I don't know what other festival I could have made it at."
 

View the original article here

Kidman to star on Cannes jury

Australian actor Nicole Kidman poses during the photocall for The Paperboy at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Picture: AFP Source: AFP

THE Cannes Film Festival has announced its most Hollywood-heavy jury lineup in years, with a list that includes Oscar winners Nicole Kidman, Christoph Waltz and Ang Lee.

Veteran filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who is 2013's jury president, will make this an Oscar-winning quartet - a rare event for a festival that prides itself on celebrating less mainstream, independent cinema.

"The Oscars (connection) is a coincidence as all these people are friends of Cannes. And don't forget that these stars are also involved and engaged in independent cinema," Cannes Artistic Director Thierry Fremaux told The Associated Press.

"It has to be legitimate and glamorous...They all have their (unique) place in the jury," he added.

Kidman, who trod the Riviera festival's red carpet last year for the nominated The Paperboy, will certainly add a glamour factor, but will join a host of lesser known, but equally important, industry names including Romanian director Cristian Mungiu who won the festival's prize for best screenplay in 2012 for Beyond The Hills.

Other jurors include French actor Daniel Auteuil, Indian actress Vidya Balan, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, and Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase.

They will all vote on the 19 nominated films, which include a sprinkling of works by old Cannes favourites like Roman Polanski, the Coen Brothers and Steven Soderbergh, to decide the winner of the coveted Palme d'Or. The festival's top accolade will be awarded on May 26.

In what will please those who have accused Cannes of sexism in the past, again this year the jury is balanced between genders.

"It's tradition: a male or female president, then four women and four men. It's important that at a time when women's in cinema is under scrutiny, to stick to this tradition," said Fremaux.

Last year, Cannes was accused of sexism for a compiling a Palme d'Or shortlist of films that included no women directors. This year, there is only one female Palme d'Or contender, from the sister of former French first lady Carla Bruni, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi with her feature A Chateau in Italy.

View the original article here

Spielberg invited onto Cannes jury

Director Steven Spielberg has been named head of the Cannes Film Festival jury. Source: AP

STEVEN Spielberg, named head of the Cannes Film Festival jury, is one of modern cinema's most influential filmmakers.

The 66-year-old was named to the prestigious post days after his second disappointing awards season in two years, with his top-tipped drama Lincoln going home with only two Oscars out of 12 nominations last weekend.

So it will come as a welcome honor to be selected to help choose this year's Palme d'Or at the world's top film festival, to be held on the French Rivieria May 15-26.

Spielberg has directed more than 50 films in his five-decade career, including pop culture touchstones such as Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park.

His movies - a canny mix of big-budget, effects-laden blockbusters and intensely personal projects - have raked in over $4 billion at the box office, according to Boxofficemojo.

However, his last Oscar was 14 years ago for Saving Private Ryan, and despite repeated nominations, he has fallen short of his earlier award-winning success.

Born in the eastern US state of Ohio in December 1946 and raised in Arizona, Spielberg is the oldest of four children born to a Jewish engineer and a musician mother.

By the age of 12, he had made his first movie, an eight-minute Western called The Last Gun, which the future mogul financed with proceeds from a tree-planting business.

Two years later, he had made two more films, a war movie and another in which he spliced World War II newsreel footage of planes together with film he had taken at his local airport - his first special effects.

After leaving school, Spielberg went to university near Los Angeles but dropped out and began hanging around Hollywood's Universal Studios, where he became a tour guide.

After sneaking onto sets, he was spotted by a screenwriter who taught cinematic techniques, and when he was 22, Universal gave him a seven-year contract making television shows after his short film, Amblin,,won a prize.

He made the classic TV suspense movie Duel in 1971, the story of a traveling salesman being pursued by a psychopath in a truck, which was so well received that it was released in theaters.

His career took off and he became a household name in 1975 with his second big-screen movie, the risky shark thriller Jaws, which entered into pop culture lore and launched the tradition of the summer blockbuster.

A string of mega-successes followed: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones; Poltergeist and E.T. in 1982; and the dinosaur epic "Jurassic Park" (1993).

He began producing movies with E.T. but came into his own in the field after he produced the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future, soon becoming one of Hollywood's richest and most powerful movie moguls.

His estimated net worth is $US3.2 billion ($A3.1 billion), according to Forbes magazine.

But alongside his action-packed blockbusters, Spielberg has also made several movies that were close to his heart, including Schindler's List; The Colour Purple (1985), with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey; Amistad (1997), about the slave trade; and 2005's Munich.

After some less successful projects, Spielberg co-founded the DreamWorks SKG studio in 1994 along with former Disney president Jeffrey Katzenberg and music producer David Geffen, a move that reversed his fortunes with a string of hits.

His 2011 comic book adaptation Tintin won an Oscar nomination for its music.

He followed that with War Horse - which was nominated for six Oscars but won zero - and then Lincoln, which lost to Ben Affleck's Argo for best film and Ang Lee for best director at the 85th Academy Awards last Sunday.

His upcoming projects include teaming up with Ford again on Indiana Jones 5, said already to be in the works, according to the IMDb industry website.

Spielberg is married to actress Kate Capshaw, with whom he has five children, and he also has another child with his first wife, Amy Irving.

View the original article here