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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

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      Tom Cruise on ‘Top Gun: Maverick' and Doing His Own Stunts

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      CANNES, France — It has been 30 years since Tom Cruise attended the Cannes Film Festival, and it’s evident the festival would like to make up for lost time. Perhaps that’s why, in advance of a conversation with the actor billed as a “Rendezvous with Tom Cruise” — which was itself happening in advance of the evening premiere of Cruise’s sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” — the festival played a nearly 15-minute-long clip reel of Cruise’s filmography, hyperbolically scored to Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra.” As the actor and audience watched from their seats, the reel touched on Cruise the action star, Cruise the dramatic thespian and Cruise the romantic, though the latter section, which featured him pitching woo at a bevy of leading ladies, notably left out Cruise’s ex-wife and three-time co-star Nicole Kidman.“It’s wild seeing this reel,” Cruise said after taking the stage. “It’s like your life in ten minutes — very trippy.” Cruise was speaking in front of a mostly unmasked crowd in the Salle Claude Debussy, which included hundreds of journalists and a team from Cruise’s agent, CAA. “After everything we’ve been through, it’s such a privilege to see your faces,” he said. He noted that “Top Gun: Maverick” had been held for two years because of the pandemic, though he refused to show it on a streaming service in the meantime. “Not gonna happen!” Cruise said to applause. The 59-year-old star is insistent that his movies receive a lengthy theatrical window, a mandate that has sometimes put him in conflict with studio heads, who are eager to fill their streaming services with star-driven content. And in an era where big names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Sandra Bullock have no problem appearing in films for Netflix, Cruise remains a rare holdout.“There’s a very specific way to make a movie for cinema, and I make movies for the big screen,” said Cruise. “I know where they go after that and that’s fine.” He said he even called theater owners during the pandemic to reassure them: “Just know we are making ‘Mission: Impossible.’ ‘Top Gun’ is coming out.”Cruise is a discursive speaker who will leap out of one anecdote before it’s done to land in another, then another. (Perhaps that would make for an esoteric set piece in one of his action films?) But it was striking how often he returned to his formative experience shooting the 1981 movie “Taps,” in which he acted opposite George C. Scott and found himself fascinated by the way the filmmaking worked. Cruise said that while shooting, he thought, “Please, if I could just do this for the rest of my life, I will never take it for granted.”And in the absence of any challenging questions from his interlocutor, the French journalist Didier Allouch — who was mostly content to burble blandishments like “You’re absolutely extraordinary” to his interview subject — Cruise had the freedom to basically spin his own narrative of being a determined student of cinema and his fellow man. (And “Taps,” of course.)“I was the kind of kid who always wrote goals on the wall of what kind of movies I liked or what I wanted my life to be, and I worked toward those goals,” Cruise said.Though the conversation increasingly leaned toward bland generalities — “I’m interested in people, cultures, and adventure,” Cruise said more than once — it did provide one major laugh line when Allouch asked why he was so determined to do his own stunts in the “Mission: Impossible” movies, which will soon be receiving seventh and eighth installments shot back-to-back. “No one asked Gene Kelly ‘Why do you dance?’” replied the star. More

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      Cannes Film Festival Impacted by the War in Ukraine

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      The war in Ukraine is casting a long shadow over this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On Tuesday, Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, addressed the event’s opening ceremony, with stirring rhetoric and Charlie Chaplin quotes.But the conflict had already had an impact on the festival long before Zelensky’s appearance. Within days of Russia’s invasion, in February, some of Ukraine’s leading movie directors and producers called on film festivals worldwide to boycott Russians, as a sign of support. Cannes said in a statement in March that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” but added that it would not ban Russian directors.There is one major Russian director at this year’s event: Kirill Serebrennikov, who is competing for the Palme d’Or with “Tchaikovsky’s Wife.” The Cannes press office told The Hollywood Reporter it had approved “only a few” Russian media outlets to cover the event, and that all of those outlets opposed the war. It was unclear, however, if any state news outlets had requested accreditation, and the festival did not respond to emailed questions.Two movies by Ukrainian directors are on the festival’s program: Maksim Nakonechnyi’s “Butterfly Vision” and Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction.” But even those choices might stir controversy. In March, the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled Loznitsa, because he did not support its call to boycott Russian movies.A scene from Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction.”Progress FilmRita Burkovska in “Butterfly Vision.”
      “When I hear calls to ban Russian films, I think of my Russian friends — decent and honorable people,” Loznitsa told The New York Times in March. “We cannot judge people by their passports,” he added: “They are victims of this war, just like we are.” More

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      Deepika Padukone and Co.: Meet This Year’s Cannes Jury

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      CANNES, France — This year, the Cannes jury — which selects the winners of the Palme d’Or and the competition’s other awards — is headed by Vincent Lindon, whose limber performance in last year’s Palme winner, “Titane,” was a highlight of that movie.The other jurors: Asghar Farhadi, who was here last year as the director of “A Hero”; the British actress and director Rebecca Hall; Ladj Ly, who shared the jury prize (kind of a third-place, honorable-mention award) in 2019 for directing a film called “Les Misérables”; the American director Jeff Nichols; the Indian actress Deepika Padukone; Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”; Joachim Trier, who directed last year’s crowd-pleaser “The Worst Person in the World”; and the Italian actress and director Jasmine Trinca.Here’s your #Cannes2022 jury: pic.twitter.com/b2mcD8hfzx— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) May 17, 2022
      People love to spread rumors about what goes on with the jury.Did David Cronenberg, the jury president in 1999, force his colleagues to bestow a unanimous Palme on “Rosetta,” which had screened so late in the festival that many critics didn’t even see it? (Cronenberg has denied these rumors, and in 2014, he agreed with Bilge Ebiri of Vulture that the Dardennes’ subsequent career — they went on to win the Palme again in 2005 for “L’Enfant” — had shown that choice to a good one.)Did Pedro Almodóvar, the jury president in 2017, actually prefer the French AIDS crisis film “BPM (Beats Per Minute)” to that year’s winner, “The Square”? (For the record, I was at the news conference right after that awards ceremony, and nothing Almodóvar said suggested he had anything but sincere admiration for both films.)Part of the problem, as Cronenberg pointed out in that interview, is that journalists create a horse race narrative as the festival unfolds, predicting the winners, often wrongly. And the festival basically treats the jury members as the human equivalent of an armored truck. Good luck getting an interview with them.Even when the jury explains its choices, as in the closing news conference, its members don’t usually speak out of school. There are exceptions: William Goldman, in his book “Hype & Glory,” described what went on behind the scenes when he served on the 1988 jury.Another peculiar facet of Cannes juries — which are chosen by the festival, not the jury president — is that nobody seems to care too much about the appearance of conflicts of interest. Sean Penn judged Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” after Eastwood had directed him to an Oscar in “Mystic River.” Isabelle Huppert gave the Palme to “The White Ribbon,” directed by Michael Haneke, who had worked with her on “The Piano Teacher” and “Time of the Wolf.” And Elle Fanning was a juror in 2019, judging “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Dakota Fanning, Elle’s sister, has a supporting role. (The movie left empty-handed.) More

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      Zelensky Addresses Cannes Film Festival Opening Ceremony

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      President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave a virtual address to the Cannes Film Festival opening ceremony on Tuesday, referencing Charlie Chaplin’s celebrated satire of fascism to urge some of the world’s highest-profile stars and filmmakers to similarly rise to the occasion in the face of a war “that can set the whole continent ablaze.”“The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish,” Zelensky said, quoting Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.”Appearing via satellite in his now signature military green shirt, Zelensky lionized the power of film in his address and received a standing ovation from the crowd gathered on the French Riviera.“Again, then as now, there is a dictator,” Zelensky said. “Again, then as now, there is a war for freedom. Again, then as now, cinema must not be silent.”The address was his latest stop on a persistent and wide-ranging virtual diplomatic tour to keep global attention on his country’s plight. Since Russia’s invasion began in late February, he has delivered addresses via video link to governments of countries as large as the United States and as small as Malta on a regular basis.In April, he made a surprise virtual address at the Grammys, telling the audience that his country’s musicians were wearing “body armor instead of tuxedos.”“They sing to the wounded in hospitals,” he said, “even to those who can’t hear them.”Later that month, he made a live-streamed appearance at the Venice Biennale. Speaking at the opening of the exhibition “This is Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky vividly described the horrors that his people were enduring. With a digital Ukrainian flag fluttering behind him, he said: “There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art. Because they can see the power of art. Art can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise.”Mr. Zelensky’s oratory efforts have been remarkably effective in securing his country the weapons, aid and international support needed to fight Russia. He is a former actor, and starred as an unlikely Ukrainian president in “Servant of the People,” a TV satire that prefaced his own, actual election to the presidency in 2019.Aurelien Breeden More

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      Cannes Film Festival Gives Forest Whitaker Lifetime Achievement Award

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      The American actor Forest Whitaker received an honorary Palme d’Or lifetime achievement award at the opening ceremony for the 75th edition of the festival on Tuesday.At the ceremony, the festival played clips from some of his of movies — “Bird,” “Ghost Dog,” “The Color of Money,” “Panic Room.” And in the theater, the actor received a standing ovation.The first standing ovation of Cannes! It’s given to Forest Whitaker, here at the opening ceremony to accept an honorary Palme d’Or pic.twitter.com/0Bqc6v3igx— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) May 17, 2022
      A familiar face at the festival, Whitaker said in a statement: “It’s always a privilege to return to this beautiful festival to both screen my own work, and to be inspired by many of the world’s greatest artists — and I feel incredibly honored to be celebrated as part of the festival’s momentous 75th anniversary.” More

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      David Cronenberg and Claire Denis Will Compete at Cannes Film Festival

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      Organizers announced a lineup of nearly 50 movies for the event’s 2022 edition, including 18 in the running for the top honor, the Palme d’Or.LONDON — Movies by David Cronenberg, Claire Denis and Park Chan-wook will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced on Thursday.Films by previous winners Ruben Ostlund, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Cristian Mungiu will also be among the 18 titles in the running for the festival’s top award, as will a movie by the high-profile Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.An initial lineup of nearly 50 movies that will play in this year’s festival was announced on Thursday by Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, in an online news conference.The event will open its 75th edition on May 17 with a comedy called “Z (Comme Z)” by Michel Hazanavicius, a French director best known for “The Artist.” The festival runs through May 28.Cronenberg’s competition entry, “Crimes of the Future,” is his first movie since “Maps to the Stars,” which also premiered at Cannes, in 2014. “Crimes of the Future” stars Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen, and Frémaux noted that it would bring some glamour to the red carpet.Denis’s “Stars at Noon” will be the director’s fifth movie at Cannes. Set in Nicaragua, it tells the story of a blossoming romance between an English businessman and an American journalist.Park is presenting a detective movie, “Decision to Leave.” Although he has never won the Palme d’Or, he won the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-highest award, for his violent thriller “Oldboy” in 2004.Most of the highest-profile movies that will play out of competition at Cannes were known before Thursday’s announcement. Baz Luhrmann will return to the Croisette to present “Elvis,” his biopic of the singer, starring Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as his manager, Col. Tom Parker.On May 18, Tom Cruise is set to appear for the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick,” the highly anticipated, and repeatedly delayed, sequel to the fighter pilot movie that helped make Cruise a superstar.Frémaux on Thursday announced a few more out-of-competition titles by high-profile directors. Ethan Coen will present his first movie directed without his usual collaborator, his brother, Joel: a documentary called “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” about the rock ’n’ roll pioneer.George Miller, the creator of the “Mad Max” franchise, will also return to Cannes with “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” a fantasy romance starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, that Frémaux said was a philosophical “reflection on the history of the world.”In the days leading up to Thursday’s announcement, there were suggestions that the lineup would include a new movie from David Lynch, his first feature since “Inland Empire” in 2006. But on Tuesday, Lynch laughed off the suggestion in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I have no new film coming out,” he said. “That’s a total rumor.”Of the 18 movies in competition, only three are directed by women, Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Les Amandiers” joining Denis’s “Stars at Noon.” Cannes has faced criticism in recent years for the dearth of female contestants for its top prize. Julia Ducournau took last year’s Palme d’Or for “Titane,” her violent horror movie about a woman sexually obsessed with cars. Yet she was only the second woman to win the prize, following Jane Campion’s 1993 win for “The Piano.”The war in Ukraine will also cast a shadow over this year’s event. Since Russia’s invasion, some of Ukraine’s leading movie directors have called on film festivals to boycott Russian directors as a sign of support for Ukraine. Cannes said in a statement in March that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” but added that it would not ban Russian directors, several of whom have faced difficulties operating in their home country.Serebrennikov, who is presenting a competition film about the marriage of a Russian cultural icon, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” spent almost two years under house arrest in Russia because of fraud charges. His conviction was widely seen within Russia as an attempt to crack down on artistic freedom.Frémaux announced that two movies by Ukrainian directors would appear in the festival, including Maksim Nakonechnyi’s “Butterfly Vision” playing in the “Un Certain Regard” sidebar.The jury for this year’s festival has not been finalized, Frémaux said on Thursday, adding that the movie lineup wasn’t entirely complete, either. The list of films would be “fine tuned” next week, he added, because “many films came in late” to the selection committee. More