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      Colin Cantwell, ‘Star Wars’ Spacecraft Designer, Dies at 90

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      He created the look of the X-wing and the Death Star; he also worked on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “WarGames.”Colin Cantwell, an animator, conceptual artist and computer expert who played significant production roles in seminal science fiction films like “2001: A Space Odyssey, “Star Wars” and “WarGames,” died on May 21 at his home in Colorado Springs, Colo. He was 90.His partner, Sierra Dall, said the cause was dementia.Mr. Cantwell’s work on several influential movies reached its peak with “Star Wars,” George Lucas’s hugely successful space opera. To impress Mr. Lucas, Mr. Cantwell built two elaborate steampunk-like spacecraft models from parts he had culled from dozens of hobbyist’s kits. He got the job before Mr. Lucas had found a studio.Mr. Cantwell produced the original designs for spacecraft familiar to fans of “Star Wars” (later retitled “Star Wars, Episode IV — A New Hope”): the X-wing, the Rebel Alliance’s starfighter; the TIE fighter, part of the Galactic Empire’s imperial fleet; the wedge-shaped Imperial Star Destroyer; the cockpit for the Millennium Falcon; and the Death Star, the Empire’s enormous battle station, with a weapon capable of destroying a planet.“Colin’s imagination and creativity were apparent from the get-go,” Mr. Lucas said in a tribute on a Lucasfilm “Star Wars” website, adding, “His artistry helped me build out the visual foundation for so many ships that are instantly recognizable today.”Describing the design of the X-wing, Mr. Cantwell said in an interview on Reddit in 2016: “It had to be ultracool and different from all the other associations with aircraft, etc. In other words, it had to be alien and fit in with the rest of the story.” He got the original concept, he said, from “a dart being thrown at a target in a British pub.”His original design of the Death Star did not include the meridian trench. But as he created the model, he realized that it would be easier to include it. And it turned out to be critical to the design: In the film, the trench contains a thermal exhaust port that proves to be the source of the Death Star’s destruction.Gene Kozicki, a visual effects historian and archivist, said that Mr. Cantwell was most likely the first person Mr. Lucas hired to design the spaceships.“George had some rough shapes in mind for the ships that would make you know these are the good guys and these are the bad guys, but the details were left to Colin to work out,” he said in a phone interview. “All his designs evolved; it was all a group effort, but Colin was the godfather of the models.”In an interview with the Original Prop Blog in 2014, Mr. Cantwell described his interplay with Mr. Lucas.“He would say, ‘Oh, I want an Imperial battle cruiser,’ and I’d say, ‘What scenes do you want to shoot with it and how big is it?’” Mr. Cantwell said. “He said, ‘Really big,’ and I’d say, ‘Is it bigger than Burbank?’”An X-wing starfighter, one of the spacecraft Mr. Cantwell designed for “Star Wars,” on display at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.Stephen Osman/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesColin James Cantwell was born on April 3, 1932, in San Francisco. His father, James, was a graphic artist, and his mother, Fanny (Hanula) Cantwell, was a riveter during World War II.As a child, Colin was fascinated by outer space but could not go anywhere for two years: After he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, his treatment involved being forced to sit immobilized in a dark room with a heavy vest across his chest to prevent coughing fits.“Suffice to say, nothing could slow me down after that!” he wrote on Reddit.He studied animation at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a bachelor’s degree in applied arts in 1957. A love of architecture led him to create building designs that he personally showed to Frank Lloyd Wright, who was impressed enough that Mr. Cantwell was invited to study at Wright’s school of architecture in Arizona. Mr. Cantwell was accepted, but when Wright died in 1959, he decided not to proceed.“Colin had no interest in working with any other architect,” Ms. Dall said in a phone interview, “so that ended his architectural career.”In the 1960s, Mr. Cantwell was a contract worker for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing programs to educate the public about early space missions, and for Graphic Films in Los Angeles, which made live-action and animated films for NASA, the U.S. Air Force and industry clients. Douglas Trumbull, who died this year, had worked at Graphic Films before being hired by the director Stanley Kubrick for “2001.”Mr. Trumbull became a special photographic effects supervisor on “2001,” and Mr. Cantwell joined the crew from Graphic Films in 1967, during the last six months of its production. He organized 24-hour shifts of animation to complete the film’s animation, according to “Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece” (2018), by Michael Benson. Mr. Cantwell also produced some of the movie’s space sequences, suggested different camera angles to depict the arrival of a shuttle on the film’s space station, and worked with Mr. Trumbull to depict Jupiter’s moons.And, Mr. Benson wrote, Mr. Cantwell’s conversations with Kubrick about Ingmar Bergman’s filmmaking led Mr. Cantwell to produce a tightly symmetrical animated shot that appeared in the “Dawn of Man” sequence early in the film: a low-angle view of the mysterious black monolith on Earth, with clouds beyond it, the sun rising and a crescent moon above.For “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Mr. Cantwell contributed technical dialogue and created early computer-generated imagery of unidentified flying objects strafing the landing site at Devils Tower in Wyoming, for a sequence late in the film. His U.F.O. imagery did not make it into the film — Steven Spielberg, the director, relied instead on old-fashioned special effects technology created by Mr. Trumbull — but the subject of U.F.O.s intrigued Mr. Cantwell, who claimed to have once been part of a group that witnessed a mysterious object in the night sky.In a provenance letter for an auction of his artifacts and memorabilia in 2014, he described the experience: “A silent intense light rose in the east, climbing to our zenith where, instantly doubling in brightness, it launched straight upward.”Mr. Cantwell worked on two other movie projects after “Close Encounters” and “Star Wars”: “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” (1979) and “WarGames” (1983). For “Buck Rogers,” he created a system that let animators simulate spacecraft movements as they designed space battles.“Colin’s imagination and creativity were apparent from the get-go,” George Lucas said of Mr. Cantwell.Sierra DallHe also worked as a computer consultant for Hewlett-Packard, where he helped develop the first color display systems for desktop computers. He and a team working on “WarGames” used the company’s computers to create the graphics — projected on giant screens at the North American Aerospace Defense Command facility — that appeared to show a massive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union against the United States.Mr. Cantwell also wrote two science fiction books, “CoreFires” (2016) and “CoreFires2” (2018), about what happens to humanity after it has colonized the galaxy.Ms. Dall is his only immediate survivor.A year after the release of “2001,” Mr. Cantwell played a role in the reality of space exploration. As a liaison between NASA and CBS News, he sat a few feet from the anchorman Walter Cronkite, feeding him information, during the moon landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.“Halfway through the final descent, I alerted Walter to my detection of an orbit change that would consume more fuel, but allow coasting a little further than the planned target,” Mr. Cantwell told Reddit. “When the other TV stations had the ship landed according to their NASA manual, I determined that the Apollo had not yet landed. This was later confirmed that I had the accurate version of landing.” More

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      ‘Since I Been Down’ Review: Crime and Punishment

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      The inmates in this documentary offer reasons for rethinking the harsh sentencing of young people in Washington State.On a May night in 1997, in Tacoma, Wash., Kimonti Carter strafed a car he believed was carrying rival gang members. It wasn’t — not that that should matter. One of the car’s five passengers, a college student, Corey Pittman, 19, was killed. Carter, who had recently turned 18, was sentenced to life in prison.In the director Gilda Sheppard’s sympathetic documentary “Since I Been Down,” the punishment is also a crime.Rife with archival visuals of Tacoma in the late 1980s and ’90s, when crack cocaine and gang violence were claiming lives, the documentary’s greatest strength is as a listening tour, with Carter as its chief guide.Because Carter shot from a car, he was charged with aggravated first-degree murder, which carried an automatic mandatory life sentence. (His resentencing hearing is scheduled for July 8.) He is not the only subject of harsh prison time. Washington State’s three-strikes sentencing (it abolished parole in 1984) can land especially hard on young offenders.Over the decades, Carter has expressed remorse, but it is his role as a beneficiary of and leader in the inmate-led initiatives the Black Prisoners’ Collective and T.E.A.C.H., or Taking Education and Changing History, that suggests transformation.Other inmates here share insights, as do two former detectives, some ex-gang members, and the mothers of victims and perpetrators. One former inmate, Tonya Wilson, who served 17 years, is especially astute about the personal as well as societal forces that led to her incarceration.Another inmate says, “We say a lot of the answers that people in society are seeking will be found in prison.”“We’ve caused pain,” that inmate says, “primarily ’cause we were in pain.”Far from seeming like an excuse, in “Since I Been Down,” this observation sounds like a way toward reckoning and change.Since I Been DownNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Juancho Hernangómez Winds Down With Good Wine and the Stars Above Asturias

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      The N.B.A. player and star of the new basketball movie, “Hustle,” talks about his first foray into Hollywood and his cultural interests off the court.The N.B.A. player Juancho Hernangómez, a power forward with the Utah Jazz, lives for basketball — now. But as boys, he and his older brother, Willy, a center with the New Orleans Pelicans, had different aspirations. Despite both of their parents having been professional ballers, “We wanted to be soccer players as every kid in Spain,” he said in a video call from his home in Madrid.But then he grew to 6 feet 9 inches. After which, “I just fall in love with basketball,” he said. “That’s my only goal.”So when his agent suggested he audition for “Hustle,” Adam Sandler’s latest movie, premiering on Netflix on June 8 and in select theaters next month, Hernangómez was understandably hesitant. “I didn’t know if I was going to be good,” he said.Urged on by his brother and sister, Andrea, also a basketball player, he propped up his phone on the kitchen table and had a little fun acting out the script. Several casting rounds later, followed by Zoom calls from Sandler and the movie’s director, Jeremiah Zagar, he’d landed the role.In “Hustle,” Hernangómez plays Bo Cruz, a Spanish street ball phenom in Timberland boots plucked from obscurity by Sandler’s Stanley Sugerman, a bone-tired scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Sugerman recognizes potential in his undiscovered talent, but Cruz, who has a volatile temper and is raising a young daughter, carries some heavy baggage.As for a career in Hollywood, Hernangómez, who considers himself “a normal 26-year-old guy,” has no pretensions. “I cannot say I’m never going to do a movie because that’s not true,” he said. “It’s got to be the right movie.”“But if this is my only movie, I’m going to die so happy,” he said as he described the things that excite him off the court — good wine, street art and classic cars. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Wine Tastings I love to go and know more about wine with my family, with my friends. It’s the connection. It’s the energy. The mood. I can be talking with a glass of wine for hours. And I want to keep learning. I love to ask about the history of the wines, why they do that in that location. Wine is recollection. It is waiting, patience.2. Street Art The father of the director, Jeremiah Zagar, his name is Isaiah Zagar, and he’s an artist in Philly. He started doing that on the streets of Philly, and all of Philly has got something special of him. I feel in Spain they kill the art instinct. The education system is really bad, and they’ve got to change because in America, they develop the talent — singing or painting or playing the guitar, whatever the talent is.3. Experiencing New Cultures Now when I’m going to a city, I try to wake up early to walk around just to see the art or to see the buildings, how the people eat, how the people drink coffee, how the people talk. It’s beautiful. A lot of my teammates, they’ve never been out of America. They told me, “I travel a lot. I went to Mexico.” And I was like, “Brother, but this is not traveling.”4. Local Food Because we are N.B.A. players, we go to fancy restaurants. But I told them, “I’m not going to eat in fancy restaurants. I want to go to the local restaurant.” If I go Italy, I want the dirty restaurant where they’ve been open since 1920 and they were a hundred years doing the best pizza. When I’m going to San Francisco, I eat the seafood there, even if you get dirty doing the crab thing.5. Classic Cars My dream is to have a Mustang from 1968, ’69. I’m still looking because it’s hard to find a good one. When I get to be 70 years old, I’ll give it to my son, his son will give it to his son — three, four, five generations, like a family thing. Classic cars, you take care of them like your kids.6. Following the Economy We’re living in a world where the changes are really quick, so you’ve got to be ready. You see what happened with the cryptocurrencies in the last year. Everybody went crazy. Now it’s going down. I love to read every day what they say, how people predict things that never happen, then the people who [others] say were wrong when they were true. My dad always tells me if you invest in something, believe that you lost it so you don’t regret it.7. The Hermanos Hernangómez Basketball Camp It’s the thing that I’m most proud of. We made a camp, my brother and myself and my sister, for two weeks in Spain, in my hometown, and the kids go to play basketball. But it’s not just for basketball. They go to the swimming pool. They’ve got art. They’ve got English class. They play soccer. We go there every single day. I love kids so much, so I’m playing with them. Parents always tell me, “It was the best week of his life.”8. Country Music I didn’t hear country until I went to Denver [to play with the Nuggets]. I went to Red Rocks and they put on a country concert and it was unbelievable. You see the sunset. It’s just the vibe. There’s something special about Red Rocks that makes that even better.9. Learning About the Film Industry Before I came to Hollywood, I never expected it was going be like that. How hard they work behind the scenes. How many hours, how many efforts. How many quarantines, how many Covid tests. Everybody with a mask. The last day on set, I rented a truck of sushi for all the crew. I was like, “I’ve been working for you two months and I didn’t even see your face.”10. Asturias, Spain I just bought a place there, and it’s probably the place where I was happiest in my life. Asturias is in the north of Spain. It’s in the mountains, and they’ve got the sea, too. There’s no wifi, no connection. You wake up, everybody cooks together. Then we go to see the horses, the cows, the chickens. The food is so healthy, so fresh. We play board games all day. At night we’re sitting outside, and you can see the stars so bright. There’s no pollution, no contamination. It’s another world. More

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      Judge Halts Auction of ‘Wizard of Oz’ Dress Amid Ownership Battle

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      A blue-and-white dress worn by Judy Garland is the subject of a dispute between Catholic University and the family of its former drama chairman.A federal judge on Monday blocked Catholic University from auctioning off a memorable white-and-blue dress worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” after a Wisconsin woman filed a lawsuit claiming she was the rightful owner of the gingham pinafore garment donned by Dorothy.Judge Paul G. Gardephe of U.S. District Court in Manhattan granted a preliminary injunction a day before the dress was scheduled to be auctioned in Los Angeles, where it had been expected to sell for more than $1 million. Catholic University had planned to use that money to endow a new faculty position in the Rome School of Music, Drama and Art.Judge Gardephe ruled that the dress could not be sold by Catholic University until the lawsuit was resolved. Both sides are set to meet in court on June 9.In her lawsuit, filed earlier this month, Barbara Ann Hartke claims the dress belonged to the estate of her uncle, the Rev. Gilbert Hartke, who was once chairman of the university’s drama department and received the dress as a gift in 1973 from the Academy Award-winning actress Mercedes McCambridge, who was also an artist in residency at the university.Ms. McCambridge had “specifically and publicly” given the dress to Mr. Hartke as a demonstration of gratitude for “helping her battle alcohol substance abuse,” the lawsuit states.Mr. Hartke died in 1986, and Ms. Hartke says she is his closest living heir.The lawsuit states that Ms. McCambridge was a “close confidant” of Ms. Garland, but it is unclear exactly how she obtained the dress.The university has contended that the dress was a gift from Mr. Hartke, and that it was his wish for it to be kept within the institution.Shawn Brenhouse, a lawyer for Catholic University, said in a statement on Monday night that the judge’s decision “was preliminary and did not get to the merits of Barbara Hartke’s claim to the dress.”“We look forward to presenting our position, and the overwhelming evidence contradicting Ms. Hartke’s claim, to the court in the course of this litigation,” Mr. Brenhouse said.Anthony Scordo III, a lawyer for Ms. Hartke, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Monday night.The fragile dress has become legend ever since Ms. Garland wore it in the Technicolor classic in 1939, complementing the plaid look with ruby-red slippers sought by the Wicked Witch. Ms. Garland wore several versions of the dress, but only one other is known to still exist. It was sold in 2012 by Julien’s Auctions for $480,000. In 2015, it sold again for nearly $1.6 million.The location of the second dress had been a mystery until it was found by chance last year in a shoe box, inside a bag, sitting on top of faculty mailboxes. Matt Ripa, a lecturer and operations manager at the drama school, found the bag when he was cleaning up the area in preparation for renovations of the Hartke Theater.The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History helped authenticate the dress, which includes a fitted bodice, a high-necked blouse and a full skirt, with a fabric label inside inscribed “Judy Garland 4223.”Ms. Hartke claims in her lawsuit that her family was never made aware of the discovery by the university. They had known a dress existed, and were surprised to read headlines about preparations to auction it off “without any compensation to its rightful owners,” the lawsuit states.“There is no documentation demonstrating that” Mr. Hartke ever donated the dress to Catholic University, according to the lawsuit. More

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      George Miller on ‘Furiosa’ and His New Cannes Film

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      In between screenings and interviews, the 77-year-old director is working on the next film in the “Mad Max” universe, and he seems to be having a ball.CANNES, France — On Tuesday, just a few days after the premiere of his latest movie, “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” at the Cannes Film Festival, the Australian director George Miller is heading home to direct “Furiosa,” the fourth installment in his phantasmagoric “Mad Max” series.“The cast is already out there,” he said when I interviewed him Saturday. “They’ve been shooting second unit.” Miller has been working on “Furiosa” in between screenings, interviews and having what looks like a very good time at the festival. “Nowadays, modern communication allows you to be there,” he said, obviously pleased with his multitasking. “It’s really great.”Miller is a Cannes veteran, but while he’s served on three of the festival’s juries in 30 years, only two of his movies have been presented here, both out of competition. The last time was for his masterpiece “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which set the festival afire in 2015. Audiences and critics alike gave the movie plenty of love, and it received a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, winning half a dozen statuettes. Predictably, though, it lost best picture to “Spotlight,” which encapsulates the kind of self-flattering, ostensibly serious work the academy has historically embraced.I suspect that “Fury Road” was simply too far out, too uncategorizable and narratively playful, to suit old-guard academy members. It was probably also too much fun. Fun is for kiddie movies, which presumably is why Miller did win an Oscar for “Happy Feet,” a fanciful yet classically Milleresque, technically flawless tale filled with deep feelings and great questions that tethers environmental catastrophe to the story of a cute tap-dancing penguin named Mumble. “When we congregate with strangers in the dark,” Miller once said, “it’s a kind of dreaming.” Sometimes those dreams are nightmares.Hugh Keays-Byrne, center, in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Miller’s masterpiece.Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.It takes about a day to fly between Australia and France. Miller, who turned 77 in March, will be making the trip twice in less than a week, but if he was tired, he didn’t look it. To escape the din of the crowds, we met on the terrace at the office of FilmNation, which is handling the new movie’s international distribution and sales. A colleague had described Miller as professorial and alerted me that he was prone to digressions, a trait that the filmmaker cheerfully volunteered as he issued forth on movies, Einstein, the forces of the universe, Joseph Campbell and how cellphones use relativity to work.Einstein makes a special appearance in “Three Thousand Years,” which is as nearly unclassifiable as its director. As the title suggests, the movie spans millenniums to tell the sweeping story of an ancient djinn (Idris Elba) and a modern-day scholar, Alithea (Tilda Swinton). She’s traveled to Turkey for a conference — Alithea studies narratives, puzzling through them just like Miller does — but her plans take an unforeseen turn when she opens a peculiar blue-and-white-striped bottle that she’s bought, inadvertently releasing the djinn from a long captivity. What follows is a fantastical fable of love and suffering, imprisonment and release, mythology and the material world.The djinn tries to grant her three wishes, but it gets complicated. Instead, he starts recounting episodes from his long life, all involving women and intrigues that led to his repeat captivity. He tells stories, but so does Alithea, who also narrates. As the movie continues, it shifts between the C.G.I.-heavy past and the present, always returning to the djinn and Alithea, who grow progressively close. “Three Thousand Years” is essentially about storytelling, which means it’s about desire: The yearning expressed in the djinn’s tales, the longing awakened in Alithea and the craving the viewer has to find out what happens next.“Three Thousand Years” is based on “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” a story in a collection from the British writer A.S. Byatt. Miller doesn’t read fiction (he did as a kid), but someone rightly sussed that he might like the book. He was especially taken with “Nightingale” — “it kept playing in my mind as stories do” — and secured the rights. Miller said that Byatt was surprised he had singled out this story, which she’d written quickly. But it was also grounded in her own life history. She too had once gone to a conference in Istanbul. Everything in the story is true, she told him, except for the djinn.Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” the new Miller film that played at Cannes.MGMMiller wrote the script with his daughter, Augusta Gore; his wife, Margaret Sixel, edited the movie. She’s edited several of his other movies, winning an Oscar for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Miller clearly likes creating in a familial setup and has worked with some crew members repeatedly, including the cinematographer John Seale, who shot “Three Thousand Years” and “Fury Road.” Miller has been with one of his collaborators, Guy Norris, for 41 years; Norris was the stunt coordinator on “The Road Warrior” (a.k.a. “Mad Max 2”) and is serving as the second-unit director on “Furiosa.”Norris holds a special place in the “Mad Max” history because of an accident he had while driving a stunt car for “The Road Warrior.” One of the signatures of the “Mad Max” series is the elegantly choreographed, seemingly gravity-defying practical stunts, and this one involved Norris driving into two other vehicles and then into a ditch. It didn’t go as planned and he flew through the air the wrong way, missing his high-tech cushioning (a pile of cardboard boxes) and badly hurting himself — ouch. In the video of the accident (it’s available online), you can see that Miller was among the first to race to Norris’s side. You might expect that from any decent person, except that in this case the visibly worried filmmaker was also a doctor.Miller, who grew up in a small town in Queensland, Australia, attended medical school with his fraternal brother, John. (They have two other brothers.) A movie lover since childhood, Miller made his first film, a short, while in school. By the time he made his first feature, a low-budget wonder called “Mad Max,” he was a doctor. His day job came in handy, he explained, because every time the production ran out of money, he worked as an emergency physician to make money. He practiced for about a decade, only finally quitting when he made “Road Warrior.” Filmmaking, he thought, “was a really interesting thing to do, but there was no real career.”He and his former producing partner Byron Kennedy (who died in 1983) had made “Mad Max” out of what Miller describes as “pure curiosity.” As Miller talks, it’s clear that curiosity remains a driving force for him. One particularly lovely story that he shares hinges on a lecture at school delivered by the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. “He synthesized so much that was rumbling around loosely my mind,” said Miller, who was struck by Fuller’s remark that “I am not a noun, I seem to be a verb.” Suddenly, Miller wasn’t a medical student, he was simply studying medicine — which liberated him.Miller has been going and shooting and moving ever since. He too is a verb, I think, and not a noun, and shows no sign of stopping. Listening to him spin story after story, I suddenly thought I knew why he didn’t read fiction — or at least I thought I did, so I asked if his imagination crowded his head, leaving no room for other’s people’s stories. “Definitely,” he said. “If I’m walking down the street, there’s some story or something going in my head. As I’ve often said to my family, ‘If I’m the guy sitting in the nursing home in a wheelchair staring at the ceiling, probably there’s some sort of story going on.’”For now, though, it’s just go, go, go. More

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      Angela Lansbury Will Receive Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement

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      The star of stage, film and screen has already won five competitive Tony Awards, and starred in several Stephen Sondheim musicals.Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star of stage, film and television, will be honored this year with a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.Lansbury, 96, who has already won five competitive Tony Awards, will receive the lifetime achievement award on June 12, when this year’s ceremony is set to take place at Radio City Music Hall and to be broadcast on CBS.Lansbury first appeared on Broadway in 1957, in a farce called “Hotel Paradiso,” and in 1964 she starred in her first Broadway musical, “Anyone Can Whistle,” a flop that is remembered mostly because the songwriter was Stephen Sondheim.She was already a three-time Oscar nominee, notably for “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962, when she landed her breakout Broadway role, starring as the free-spirited title character in “Mame” in 1966. She won her first Tony Award for that performance. More

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      Cannes Cameraman Explains How He Shoots Standing Ovations

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      Jean-Baptiste Cortet explains what he focuses on and why (partly to goad the audience) when he’s filming those premiere close-ups.CANNES, France — Imagine a cameraman pointing his camera directly at you.Now imagine it moving closer to your face. No, even closer than that. So close you could almost forget that this moment is shared not just between you and the cameraman, but 2,300 other people who surround you, applaud you and are hanging on your every gesture.That’s what it feels like when you’re caught in one of the Cannes Film Festival’s infamously elongated standing ovations, in which each twitch of your face — whether from pride, embarrassment or boredom — is captured by the cameraman and broadcast to the Grand Théâtre Lumière’s movie screen, where your supersized reactions play instead of the closing credits.Even for celebrities, the scrutiny of the Cannes cameraman can be a lot to withstand. This week, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba teared up in front of the camera after the premiere of “Three Thousand Years of Longing”; last year, long into a sustained ovation for “Annette,” the cameraman panned to a cast member, a bored Adam Driver, as he lit a cigarette. In 2019, as the applause for “Parasite” refused to die down after several minutes, director Bong Joon Ho was even caught on camera leaning over to his lead actor and complaining, “I’m hungry.”We are on Minute 5 of the ANNETTE standing ovation and Adam Driver has begun smoking a cigarette pic.twitter.com/F56r0W0nGL— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) July 6, 2021
      The mechanics of the Cannes standing ovation have long fascinated civilians, but as more clips from those moments go viral on social media, it’s the sustained close-ups that have begun to spur the most debate. “The Cannes standing ovation camera is simply too much to watch,” said one Twitter user, evidently suffering from secondhand embarrassment. “I would honestly just melt if it was on me.”According to Jean-Baptiste Cortet, it isn’t easy to be the one wielding the camera, either. “I can see how uncomfortable they are, and I feel it,” Cortet said. “I would not want to be in their spot in this moment!”Cortet, an excitable, apple-cheeked Parisian who met me on a Cannes terrace wearing a Jeff Koons T-shirt and cuffed bluejeans, has spent three decades working for Cannes and began filming the festival’s standing ovations seven years ago. And yes, he knows what people think. “I saw on the internet that people were making fun of it!” he said, ready to clear the air: He isn’t nearly as close to those celebrities as it looks.By way of demonstrating, Cortet positioned me against the terrace railing and backed a few paces away while brandishing an imaginary camera. “I make sure that I’m as far away as I can, and I zoom in to do the close-up,” he told me, speaking through a translator. He said he would never dare put his camera lens just inches from someone’s face: “Comedians hate that. Especially actresses!”In many ways, Cortet is the standing ovation’s secret weapon. The audience does not simply clap into a vacuum for several minutes: They are guided and goaded by Cortet, who continually searches for new things to shoot and broadcasts those close-ups onto the big screen behind him.“The cameraman has the responsibility to carry the emotion of the room,” Cortet said. And those emotions can run very high at Cannes, especially when the film ends and the lights first go up. “This is the time when I’m able to catch an embrace, a discussion between two people — I can navigate through these different moments,” Cortet said. “I like it more when it’s messy.”A few minutes into those candid moments, Cortet locks into a routine: He will go down the row of actors, filming each one for a surprisingly sustained amount of time, a phase he calls “the eye line.” This is the bit that often extends the standing ovation to record-breaking levels, especially if there’s a large ensemble cast and a famous director present. Then, once everyone has had a solo moment in front of Cortet’s camera, they can pair off in new combinations, a phase that pads the ovation stopwatch even more.And just over Cortet’s shoulder at most of the premieres is the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, who pushes the cameraman even closer to the stars while exclaiming, “Close-up! Close-up!” Shooting the eye line is “a mix of me feeling the emotion and knowing how to film it, and Thierry knowing who to aim at,” Cortet said, adding with a laugh, “I prefer when I’m alone.”Some Cannes regulars, like Spike Lee and David Lynch, are now familiar with Cortet and wink or nod when he goes in for the shot. “These directors, who are usually on the other side of the camera, they recognize the difficulty,” he said. “It’s a pleasure for me to see they have empathy for the situation.”But not every director can stand it. During the ovation for “The French Dispatch,” Cantet moved into the aisle to block Wes Anderson when he noticed the auteur eyeing the exits.“I have to refrain the directors from leaving!” he said. “They want to trespass past me.”Cortet doesn’t usually enter the theater until 10 minutes from the ending, so it’s sometimes difficult for him to pick up on how well the film has gone over until the crowd leaps from their seats. “I don’t feel the same emotions as the people in the room,” he said. “I don’t understand the why’s of this raw moment.”Still, he’s a quick learner. At the premiere of “Armageddon Time,” when the director James Gray burst into tears, Cortet got a little misty, too.“It happens many times: I feel such a strength of emotion carry to me that tears fall from my eyes,” he said. “And then I can’t see anything because it’s too blurry! More

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      A Cannes Faux Pas, as Tik Tok Comes to Town.

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      CANNES, France — Shorts made on TikTok haven’t been seen on the big screen in the Grand Théâtre Lumière just yet, but last week the video app was still accused of a Cannes faux pas: attempting to influence a jury’s decisions.In March, TikTok announced that it would be an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival this year. Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s artistic director, was quoted saying that the collaboration was “part of a desire to diversify the audience” of the festival. Billboards that read “ceci n’est pas un film, c’est un vidéo TikTok” loom over the awnings across the street from one of the main movie theaters here.TikTok also announced a competition for short films shot on its app. Although not an official festival event, the competition had a jury headed by the Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime who has been a regular presence at Cannes with films like “The Missing Picture” and “Exile.”But Panh quit as the jury’s president on Wednesday, he said, two days before the awards were to be given out, only to return to his role on Friday morning, hours before the awards ceremony. Panh said by email that he had quit because TikTok had “seemed to want to influence our decision about prize winners,” and that he returned to his post when the company agreed to respect the jury’s verdict.“Their world, it’s not the art world,” Panh said in an interview later on Friday afternoon, sitting on a couch on the deck of the beachfront restaurant where he and his four fellow jurors had just given out the awards.While declining to name names, Panh said some employees at TikTok had wanted to select different winners from the jury’s short list. It was “multiple people from TikTok,” he said. “One or two were very aggressive, very stubborn, very closed minded.”TikTok issued a statement that seemed to attribute any trouble to ordinary disagreements in selecting winners. “As with any creative competition where the selection of a winner is open to subjective interpretation, there may be differences of artistic opinion from the independent panel of judges,” the statement said.Even after receiving a guarantee that the jury’s choices would be honored, Panh said his first instinct was not to return to the jury. But he said he ultimately came back for the filmmakers. Some, he added, had traveled to Cannes from as far away as Japan or New Zealand. “You just can’t break their dream, you know?”The ceremony on Friday was hosted by the social media personality Terry LTAM, who asked the jurors about their experiences watching the shorts. The Sudanese filmmaker Basma Khalifa said the judging process changed her perspective on the platform. “I didn’t give TikTok enough credit, I don’t think, for how much you can do with it,” she said.Filmmakers from 44 countries submitted films to the competition, all between 30 seconds and three minutes in length. The top prize was shared between two directors: Mabuta Motoki, from Japan, whose film showed a man meticulously building a wooden tub, and Matej Rimanic, a 21-year-old Slovenian director who submitted a comedic black and white short in which two people flirt using a paper airplane. Rimanic said that working on social media platforms had sparked his desire to make movies.“I started posting videos on Vine, then I went to Instagram and then TikTok came around, so I started posting on TikTok,” he said in an interview shortly after he received his award, a gold-colored statuette shaped like TikTok’s logo. “Now during this transition of me posting on videos on social media, I discovered my love for filmmaking.”It was his first time at Cannes, either to attend the festival, or to visit the city. “I hope that one day I can come here with my feature film,” he said. “I only make comedies because the world needs more laughter.” More