The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  Anderson had a blast, he admits to me later, walking to the top of the Palais steps and doing the ritual photo poses with Cannes general delegate Thierry Frémaux, Moonrise Kingdom cowriter Roman Coppola, and the cast: Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, and Anderson’s two young discoveries, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward. Then Anderson walked into the 2,400-seat Salle Lumière to the de rigueur standing ovation and booming announcement of “L’auteur, Wes Anderson!” Heady stuff.

  Anderson’s seven movies are utterly identifiable as his, from his 1996 debut with Texas pal Owen Wilson, Bottle Rocket, and its follow-up, Rushmore, to 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited. Sometimes his arch artificiality is winning (The Royal Tenenbaums), other times, irritating (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). In the case of his latest film, it works.

  Every frame of Moonrise Kingdom is arranged to perfection; the dialogue is deliciously flat; the sixties period references are selected with humor and affection. This remote island family comedy, which was filmed in 16 millimeter on Conanicut Island in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, is packed with eager Khaki Scouts and anxious, bumbling, disappointed, and well-meaning adults. But at its heart is a budding romance between two twelve-year-old loners (Gilman and Hayward). Their powerful feelings ignite strong reactions in everyone around them as a storm rises and lightning literally strikes them twice.

  Anderson’s superb cast delivers precisely scripted comic moments, surrounded by such archaic 1965 props as walkie-talkies, megaphones, and person-to-person split-screen phone calls. Anderson’s cowriter and frequent collaborator, Coppola family scion Roman Coppola (The Darjeeling Limited) describes himself as a midwife helping Anderson to deliver and shape his ideas. Onetime Boy Scout Anderson tapped into personal memories of his own childhood longings, an early crush, and finding a manual, Coping with the Very Troubled Child, on top of his family refrigerator. “I wasn’t the only child in the household, but I knew I was the one,” he told the New York Times. “Now it makes me laugh, because it’s a funny thing to find, especially on top of the refrigerator. But it was a horrible feeling.”

  After the early morning press screening, many of us rush to the press room with its free Wi-Fi, café espresso, and flat-screen live stream of the photo call followed by translated Canal Plus TV interviews and the official press conferences. Anderson and his cast bask in the rapturous critical reception. The actors describe participating in a delightful family summer camp adventure; Anderson led them much the way Norton’s character leads the scout troop. As a sign of the times, the movie is one of the few in the festival shot on film. Anderson admits that it may be his last, as labs like Technicolor move to digital services and stop processing celluloid film prints. “Maybe there’s a great app that makes it look like film,” he says, “but to my mind there is no substitute.”

  “The whole movie is on the shoulders of these kids,” the brown-corduroy-suited Anderson tells me during our beachside interview, squinting in the sun as the blue Mediterranean laps behind him on the Gray d’Albion beach. “I love artifice and very emotional movies like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp . . . I’m not actually au courant.” Moonrise Kingdom, he says, is “the re-creation of a fantasy when I was a twelve-year-old.”

  As someone with vaunted auteur status, Anderson is able to score a coveted Cannes competition slot. Fox Searchlight has to settle for second-tier placement in the Cannes official selection sidebar Un Certain Regard for Benh Zeitlin’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Beasts of the Southern Wild. That’s because the Cannes brass tends to be conservative and myopic about where they place their titles. Only rarely will they take the chance of putting into the official competition a Sundance entry from an unproven director who has not already entered the official auteur canon by being lavishly praised by global critics. The exception that proved the rule was Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, a non–world premiere that went on to win the Palme d’Or in 1989.

  Thus Frémaux offered 2012 competition slots to Jeff Nichols’s Mud and Lee Daniels’s The Paperboy, both American follow-ups to prestige hits (Take Shelter and Precious) that had previously played in Cannes sidebars. Both were for sale, and both starred Texas actor Matthew McConaughey. Indie darling Donnie Darko didn’t rate a Cannes berth in 2001, but later the festival breathlessly snapped up Richard Kelly’s unfinished 2006 follow-up, the notorious Southland Tales, which inspired several highbrow critics at Cannes to make a case for its pretentious meanderings.

  In years past, Cannes has often accorded established auteurs competition slots for their weaker films, from Terry Gilliam’s drug-addled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, to Nanni Moretti’s prophetic 2011 Vatican-in-crisis comedy We Have a Pope. One reason that Cannes’s Frémaux remains loyal to the world’s chosen auteurs is that he may need them someday. Moretti was back in 2012 as Cannes jury president, presiding over the usual mix of global talent: actors Ewan McGregor (Scotland), Emmanuelle Devos (France), Diane Kruger (Germany), and Hiam Abbass (Israel); directors Alexander Payne (United States), Andrea Arnold (United Kingdom), and Raoul Peck (Haiti); and designer Jean Paul Gaultier (France). (In 2013, Frémaux finally bagged his long-sought-after American prize, Steven Spielberg, as jury chief.)

  While studio specialty divisions Searchlight and Focus dutifully trawl Cannes to acquire films with mainstream breakout potential and often leave mid-fest, the Weinstein Company, Sony Pictures Classics, Roadside Attractions, and IFC thoroughly scour the official and market screenings for gems. The executives also pack their schedules with meetings, screen early footage, and check out the landscape for projects in the works.

  SPC’s Michael Barker and Tom Bernard (who navigates the fest on a bicycle) genuinely support foreign-language fare, and tend to slug it out with IFC Films for the likeliest foreign Oscar nominees. The studio subsidiary has the advantage of deep relationships with exhibitors and Sony global output deals, as well as the savoir faire to push films with art-house audiences and Academy members alike.

  As a subsidiary of AMC Networks, IFC’s Jonathan Sehring prefers to play with a mixed menu of limited theatrical and VOD releases, and thus releases a high volume of titles that cost little to acquire and market.

  IFC has grabbed Beyond the Hills, the Romanian competition film from Cristian Mungiu, before the festival, sight unseen. They had handled his Oscar-nominated 2007 Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu is a rigorously uncompromising artist who shoots long unedited sequences with natural light and a nonprofessional cast.

  IFC has also acquired ahead of the festival Brazilian director Walter Salles’s movie version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, adapted by his Motorcycle Diaries scribe José Rivera. Salles inherited the long-in-the-works project from Francis Ford Coppola. The film stars rising young actor and breakout hopeful Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) as larger-than-life Dean Moriarty, Brit actor Sam Riley (Control) as laconic observer Sal Paradise, and Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man) and earthily sexy Kristen Stewart (Twilight) as the women in their lives. The strong supporting cast includes such Oscar regulars as Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen.

  IFC has paid more than usual for the highbrow film in hopes of positioning it in the awards race with a planned release during the crowded year-end period. But the Cannes reviews, while respectful and admiring, are just okay. To get into the awards race, you need near-consensus raves. IFC staffers are furious when my review, posted after the morning press screening, suggests the movie is not a likely awards candidate. Marketing chief Ryan Werner sends me an e-mail asking me not to show up at their rooftop gala after party. I was raining on their parade as passions were running high; months later, after things cool down, Sehring, Werner, and I kiss and make up. They were resigned by then to On the Road’s slim chances of landing Oscar nominations. And there were none.

  Every morning, attendees check out the critics’ star ratings chart in Screen International’s Cannes daily to see how eac
h film is ranked. On the Road is in the middle of the pack. It’s better to ignite fiery debate among critics than polite discussion. Critical controversy can help ignite interest in a cerebral provocation like David Cronenberg’s competition title Cosmopolis, starring Rob Pattinson as a jaded Wall Street player cruising through New York in his limo. (Distributor eOne has acquired the film pre-fest.) Similarly, Leos Carax’s outrageous stunt Holy Motors, starring Denis Lavant as a series of flamboyant characters, also generates lively online debate before it’s acquired by new Dominican Republic–financed Indomina Releasing. (By year’s end the company abandons the distribution business, yet another casualty of reckless overspending on small-audience pictures.)

  Sony Pictures Classics arrives in Cannes having already acquired at the start of production all North American rights to the tough relationship drama Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to his Oscar-nominated A Prophet. Starring Marion Cotillard as a whale trainer who loses her legs in a terrible accident, and rising Belgian star Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead) as a rough-and-tumble fighter who helps her to recover, the movie does well with critics. “We wanted to be in business with Audiard,” says Barker.

  During the festival SPC also swiftly moves to acquire Cannes sidebar Directors’ Fortnight film No from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain (Tony Manero), which winds up in the final five nominated for a foreign film Oscar. Starring gifted Mexican producer-actor Gael García Bernal (Y Tu Mamá También), the film is set during the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet and depicts the advertising men behind the “no” campaign to vote him out of office.

  While Barker and Bernard grew up in different neighborhoods in Dallas, Texas, both men were politicized by the films of the sixties and seventies, from The Battle of Algiers to The Conformist and Z. When they saw No, says Barker, they “talked about its borderline-radical film techniques that look at the politics of a world in a way that no other medium could. It reaches you and explains complex issues.”

  They also go into the fest with Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s French-language Amour, starring iconic octogenarians Jean-Louis Trintignant (Z, A Man and a Woman, The Conformist) and Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour). In 2009, SPC had released Haneke’s Palme d’Or–winning The White Ribbon, which earned Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and Cinematography.

  It’s a formidable pickup. Written and directed by Haneke, Amour stars Trintignant and Riva as long-married intellectuals coping with the crushing effects of her debilitating stroke. Isabelle Huppert, unforgettable as Haneke’s masochistic Piano Teacher (2001), plays the couple’s self-involved grown daughter. In a business that relies on trusted partnerships forged over time, SPC has enjoyed a decades-long relationship with the film’s producers, Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Ménégoz, and Michael Katz.

  On the night of the gala premiere at the Grand Lumière, there’s a torrential downpour. “The red carpet was like a sea of umbrellas,” says Barker. “In the photos of the stars, everyone was drenched. We tried to keep the actors from getting wet. I’ve never seen a storm like that for a movie opening. It was hard to keep everyone’s composure. With the two older actors, everyone had to be careful getting them up the stairs and into the theater.”

  After the credits roll, there’s a long silence as the deeply affected audience absorbs the ending, and then the thunderous standing ovation begins. “When Tom and I saw the final film,” says Barker, “we talked about the potential. What knocked us out was that the critics and exhibitors were unanimous.”

  That SPC scored the heartrending drama ahead of the festival was no fluke. The relationship with Haneke dated back to Caché (2005), a mystery on slow-burn starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, which SPC picked up as soon as they saw it at Cannes; it garnered Haneke that year’s Best Director prize. He told Sony about his plans for The White Ribbon, which triumphed at Cannes four years later, but because it was a chilling black-and-white vision of pre–First World War Germany (a kind of ritual punishment is exacted on the children of a small fictitious village as mysterious deaths occur), Sony waited to see an early screening from Haneke before buying it. With Amour, again, the producers gave Sony first crack at the finished film, but they wanted the studio to be confident in the picture before making an offer for it.

  “It felt preordained,” Barker later tells me on the phone. “It’s a subject, caring for parents, that we’re all having to live with in the culture.” He compares the film to Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 Cries and Whispers, which was nominated for five Oscars, including writing, directing, costume, and picture, and won cinematography for Sven Nyqvist. “Bergman had been making wonderful films and people thought it was his moment. We wanted that for Haneke.”

  It had been fourteen years since Trintignant had starred in a movie, and he was in frail health. But Haneke, a tall, somewhat intimidating Austrian, tells me in an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles that it didn’t take much convincing for the beloved veteran actor to take the role of Georges. He had narrated for Haneke the French version of The White Ribbon. Haneke says, “He was so enthusiastic about that film that he said yes when I asked him to work in Amour.”

  As for Riva, she, along with several other actresses, auditioned for the role of Anne, who like her husband, Georges, is a retired, highly cultivated piano teacher. Haneke says even before they met, he sensed that she and Trintignant would make a good couple. “Of course, as a young man I had seen her in Hiroshima Mon Amour and been smitten with her, but after that I lost her from view.” At the audition, Haneke says, “immediately I knew that she was the one for [the part], because she was so good, but also because they fit together so well, they play to each other so well.”

  A seamstress, poet, and photographer, Riva has enjoyed a long and happy career as an actress, still working in theater until 2001. Unmarried and childless, Riva, who lives alone in Paris, exploded on the world scene at age thirty, starring as a French actress simply named “She” in Alain Resnais’s 1959 esoteric classic of the French New Wave that had so haunted Haneke, Hiroshima Mon Amour.

  “I liked the roles I had both on the stage and in cinema,” Riva writes to me in an e-mail. “Going from one role to the other is a healthy exercise; no time for them to leave any mark on us. It is others who leave a mark on us. And I don’t want to be a prisoner of any part, or to specialize in any genre. I don’t want to cultivate my image (how boring!). I would rather always feel the freshness of something newly born.”

  Because both actors were octogenarians, Haneke deliberately scheduled a slower shoot of eight five-day weeks. “You can’t demand that they shoot a string of ten-hour days. If it had been a production involving two forty-year-old actors, we probably would have planned for a six-week shoot.” He arranged for his production designer Jean-Vincent Puzos to create an apartment at the studio for Riva to live in during the shoot so that she wouldn’t have to travel to and from set.

  The exacting atmosphere on the set paid off in masterly, once-in-a-lifetime performances. At the press conference at Cannes, both actors suggest that Haneke was very demanding. The director acknowledges that he insists on getting what he wants when he shoots a scene, and sometimes that takes a while. “The scenes with the pigeon were particularly demanding and difficult physically [for Trintignant], and shooting those two scenes took a long time . . . It’s hard to direct a pigeon.”

  THE HARVEY FACTOR

  True to form, Harvey Weinstein has already made his mark on Cannes 2012 before the festival even begins. After decades of throwing his weight around at film festivals, the wily New York indie mogul is, as usual, ahead of his competitors.

  Even though they are flying high off back-to-back Best Picture Oscar wins (The King’s Speech, The Artist), that doesn’t mean the Weinstein Company (TWC) is in robust financial shape. Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob launched the company in 2005 after a brutal breakup with Disney, which twelve years before had acquired their company Miramax—hom
e of such Oscar winners as The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, The Hours, and Chicago. After raising a billion dollars in equity and debt financing in 2005, the Weinsteins went on a buying spree, seeking to become an entertainment empire with arms in fashion, book publishing, television and film production, video games, and home entertainment. Only after their investors forced the Weinsteins to refocus on their core business—the producing, acquiring, and releasing of low-budget independent movies—did the brothers start to right the ship.

  “The first four years had nothing to do with movies,” Weinstein said to a room of producers and a few reporters at a Producers Guild breakfast at Sundance 2013. “I was so dissatisfied. I was the worst CEO for the twelve companies we bought, I was so blatantly incompetent and stupid, about almost every decision. It wasn’t my passion to do this. Okay, I had a fight with Michael Eisner at Disney. I was angry at them that they didn’t do The Lord of the Rings when I brought it in. I was angry about Fahrenheit 9/11 [Eisner insisted he give the movie to another distributor to release]. We were going to buy Bravo and AMC, monster gigantic improvements to my company to bring in, worth billions to Disney. It would have made Miramax one of the great labels and taken forward that vision of independent film . . . I was frustrated, I thought I could do what Michael Eisner can do. You taste bottom in this business. When you fail, you pick yourself up and get yourself back, whether with one movie or two. It’s not over, just keep going.”

  Arriving in Cannes 2012, the Weinsteins are on the path to recovery. In 2011, before that year’s festival slate was announced, Harvey had flown to Paris to check out what Vincent Maraval had up his sleeve. Maraval’s maverick foreign sales company, Wild Bunch, had financed and produced such daring work from indie auteurs as Darren Aronofsky’s heart-tugging Oscar contender The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, and Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour Spanish-language biopic Che. Maraval had something special to show the American distributor. The Artist was a black-and-white silent film set in 1920s Hollywood. It was directed by Michel Hazanavicius and starred his wife, Bérénice Bejo, and comedian Jean Dujardin, who had costarred in the director’s successful series of comic capers. Weinstein listened to Maraval and screened the film.