Cannes 2007 (Day Three)

Welcome welcome, to our last day in Cannes. It's more of a day and a half -- the last Friday and then half the day on Saturday -- but for the purposes of this post, let's consider it one day, as we had a nice, easy-going end to our festival.

Thursday night was Ocean's Thirteen premiere night, which made the whole town buzz -- everyone trying to get an eye on George and Brad and Angelina -- but we also learned a few days later that the cast and crew of Entourage also shot their season finale in Cannes, using the Ocean's premiere as a stand-in for the boys' own fictional premiere. So they had the Entourage cast (Grenier, Dillon & co.) walk up the red carpet after the Ocean's cast, making it even more of a crazy evening. And that also explained why the cast (including badass Jeremy Piven) kept popping up at events in Cannes, despite not having anything to plug at the fest -- they were filming their season finale. That's one episode I can't wait to see.

In any case, this means we took Thursday evening, as I mentioned in my previous post, to go see Smiley Face (shame on me!), which means we had a late night (again) and, added to our jet lag, explains why we slept in really, REALLY late (trust me) on Friday morning. We ended up spending most of the day in the hotel room or on the hotel room balcony, going through all the reading we had collected since arriving in Cannes -- Variety, Hollywood Reporter, film catalogues, Cahiers du Cinema, British Cinematographer Magazine, and many, many more. In the evening, we went to see Rio Bravo (one of the all-time great westerns) on a big screen, screened as part of the Festival's Classics collection, and that turned out to be a great experience -- not only did we see Malcolm McDowell (of Clockwork Orange) before the screening, but it was also attended and introduced by Quentin Tarantino (along with his "little brother" Edgar Wright), who described the film as one of his all-time favorites, said the characters in it were like surrogate fathers to him as he grew up, and also said that one of his criteria for women he dates is to show them Rio Bravo and make sure they like it. We also got to watch the film (definitely one of the best westerns ever -- if you haven't seen it, do it. Now. I'm serious. Stop reading this, open your Netflix queue, find it, put it at the top, and give back all the Netflix DVDs you have at home now so you're sure it comes really quick. And then the second it gets to you, sit down, watch it, enjoy, and come back and read the rest of this. Seriously. Go.) with a crowd of real film geeks, who'd applaud every time a baddie got killed, laughed and all the right lines, and all, including Maz and I, fell in love with Angie Dickinson every time she graced the screen. All in all, it was a great experience -- and without a doubt, ironically, the best film we saw at the festival.

We took an equally slow day Saturday -- the whole day was a stormy rain-out, and so we decided against waiting in line for 3hrs in the morning to see We Own The Night (which we're still amazingly excited to see), packed our bags, and went and had a nice long lunch by the sea (and sheltered from the rain). We then had a last coffee with Richard, who, amazing as usual, revealed that he had kept a bunch of Festival-related stuff (and this amazing book about Cinecitta) to give to us before we let, and then that's just what we did -- we left.

All in all, it was a terrific three days, just mind-blowing, mostly thanks to all the efforts my dad and Richard and everyone who helped us out gave to make sure we would get into some of the most exclusive events of the film year. Cannes is definitely no Sundance -- it's amazingly exclusive, a little pompous, and to be honest unless you've got tickets to everything, or a film screening of your own, or films to sell or buy, it's a hard festival to go to and freely enjoy. We do plan on coming back next year -- with a short, who knows? -- but it's definitely more of a "look at us, we've made it" festival (rather than a "we're gonna f**king make it someday" festival, which is what Sundance is), and that might be something we'll enjoy better later on in our lives. Even then -- a really great three days, which I hope I've described here in a decent fashion, and now...well, now...

...now we're back to work.

Cannes 2007 (Day Two)

Day Two. It's Thursday, in Cannes, and the highlight of our day today is what we came to Cannes for: the Film Masterclass with Martin Scorsese.

Scheduling didn't work out great -- one of the films I had been dying to see at the festival was The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, directed by notorious asshole painter Julian Schnabel, but also produced by Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy who, other than being amongst the best producers in America (and most definitely the best inside the studio system), also happen to be Steven Spielberg's producers, and producers of Indiana Jones 4 (and so people I've been keeping track of for a while now). In any case, that film's last screening took place in the same time as the Masterclass, which we could definitely not skip, so I missed out on seeing it. But the Masterclass more than more than MORE than made up for any disappointment I might've greedily had.

The Cannes filmmaker Masterclasses started, I think, sixteen or seventeen years ago, as one of the events of the fortnight -- a 2hr "class" in which a great filmmaker would teach about his career and what he learned going through it, sharing his thoughts and experiences with (in this year's case) 1,200 various film students and professionals. Previous hosts of the Cinema Masterclass have included Stephen Frears, Wong Kar Wai, Nanni Morretti and Sydney Pollack. To see any of these give a class on filmmaking would be an amazing experience, but Scorsese, to me, was more than that -- it's like a dream. My two favorite directors, in my opinion the two best directors of their time, are Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. They are artists, in the sense that they have vision, they have daring, they have a very strong personality that shows through every second of their work -- but also entertainers, aware and respectful of their audience, always trying to push the envelope of what new lands you can take viewers to. Because of the cursing and the violence in Scorsese's films, I didn't really get to see any growing up, but my dad would speak about him, and I remembered his then-funny sounding name when I got around to seeing more "grown-up" films. And so after growing up on things like Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Back To The Future, E.T., or Star Wars, suddenly I was watching things like Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Casino, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull. Stuff of such intensity and virtuosity and that had such a certain specific taste (there's a way DeNiro, Pesci and Keitel spoke, and moved, and the rhythms of the editing and the cuts in those movies that's just unique), and that I think no one has emulated since. In terms of sheer filmmaking, I think Raging Bull, in the history of film, is the 2nd best film ever, second only to The Godfather. Both are so perfect, so gorgeously acted, so well-designed that every shot could be framed and put in a museum. And when I grew up, I realized that not only had Scorsese had the most consistently amazing career of any filmmaker I could think of, but also that he had made such different movies (from Mean Streets to a small comedy like After Hours to a period piece like The Age Of Innocence to a musical like New York, New York). Spielberg and Scorsese, to me, are the epitome of what a director should be, and part of the reason I now want to produce -- because I want to make movies like theirs, and know I could never direct them.

A bit more than a year ago, I had the chance to see a night of shooting on The Departed in Brooklyn. I went with my then-neighbor Lauren, who was hoping to see Leo or Matt or Markie Mark. What we did see is a small crew, Scorsese there, shooting an insert something like 27 times. Lauren left after fifteen minutes -- I stayed for two hours. I watched the crew work, how silent and efficient they were (apparently a staple of a Scorsese crew), and I caught a few glimpses of Scorsese himself, which at the time (and still today, would) made my day.

To now see him and listen to him as he taught a class -- that was, to call things what they are, a fucking dream. To make things even more incredible, Richard not only wrangled us entry to the masterclass, but got us VIP tickets -- meaning we were the first to enter into the auditorium, and got to sit at aisle seats three rows from the stage. Which means that, when Scorsese entered, he walked by inches from us -- inches -- and then we could hear him speak from such a close distance it was like being in a small room with him.

The Masterclass was the event of the 2nd week -- amongst the crowd in the auditorium, just a few rows behind us, were Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright (director of and Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz), Claude Lanzmann (director of the acclaimed, and life-changing, documentary Shoah, amongst other things) and the now familiar face of Brett Ratner. These guys provided Maz and I with a show even before Scorsese ever entered the room -- and with our little people-watching hobby, we had a ball of a time. We noticed Ratner before anyone else did (to be fair, no one really did). He was sitting next to this pretty-ish girl, and he was all over her, leaning one arm over the back of the seat in front of him, the other one touching, stroking, and grabbing away at her. She was looking away, definitely not very taken (although if she wasn't, how did she end up next to him? Did they get reserved seats, or did they just end up right next to one another out of pure chance, or did he pick his seat because of her, and if he did, why did he, considering she was pretty but by no means a model, his prey of choice?). At some point, Ratner leaned over and tried to grab what was either her arm, or her boob, and she exasperatedly smacked his arm away, kind of pushed him back, and resumed looking away. Now Ratner joined her, looking away too, the expression on his face that of a fat, spoiled kid after being refused his 7th slice of chocolate cake. Or that of a bully who's been called out on being a prick by the one girl he claims is his girlfriend. Just angry, slightly shamed, frustrated.

And things were only about to get worse. This is about the time when Quentin Tarantino, along with puppy dog Edgar Wright (and I call him "puppy dog" because Wright followed Tarantino everywhere throughout the festival, the expression on his face that of a child begging for approval, his clean-shaven cheeks a little chubby and self-satisfied -- another, in my opinion, blatant case of geeky insecurity suddenly magnified by relative fame, praise and success). Everyone in the room noticed Tarantino -- either turning around from their seats in the first rows, or leaning down from the balcony, to take a look at him -- and three or four dozen people actually got up to take pictures of him. It was interesting to watch Tarantino (a man with legendary ego-issues himself) and the way he reacted to an amount of attention you can tell he now considers normal, well-deserved, and customary -- but it was even more interesting to watch Brett Ratner's reaction, and the jealousy that so obviously started pouring through his veins the second the hubbub started. He began by ignoring the commotion -- apparently hoping it would just die off -- and when it became painfully clear that it wouldn't (and when his pout got so tight I think it gave him lip cramps), Ratner then made an emphatic show of getting up, yelling out Tarantino's name, and waving at him like they were old buddies. He also tried to start a bit of a conversation -- but Tarantino (who obviously knew Ratner, but not that well), eager to get back to all the hero worship, soon politely cut the chat short, sat back down and went back to grinning and thumbs-uping people he never even met before in his life. Defeated, Ratner gave one more go at getting attention, by bitching at a couple of film buffs who had stepped in front of his seat to get a good shot of Tarantino on their cameras -- complaining, best of all, that their flashes were blinding him so close to his face, when the flashes, how to say, were so obviously directed in another direction altogether -- and then resumed his quest to win the World Pouting Championships.

(Also please notice on the picture above how, while everyone else at the Masterclass was urged to come dressed in "formal wear" and pretty much turned away at the door if they hadn't, QT showed up at his reserved seat dressed in, well...shorts and a Batman logo wife-beater. Ah, formal wear ain't what it used to be...)

Then came the man everyone had really come to see -- Martin Scorsese. The man was amazingly graceful, funny, and, as you can tell from any interview or press conference he's ever given, absolutely obsessed with and dedicated to film. Not a second of the Masterclass Q&A (hosted by film critic and close friend of the late Stanley Kubrick, Michel Ciment) was dedicated to red carpets, celebrities, egoes, or money -- it was all pure, down-and-out filmmaking, the art and craft, the passion, the love for it in itself and nothing else. Scorsese, at core, is a film geek, a film buff -- if he ever became a filmmaker, it was to make films, period. No fortune and glory, no superstar fantasies -- just making movies. And after spending so much time with people whose only ambition is to be in the spotlight, and still dare call themselves actors; or people whose only ambition is to have power over people, and still dare call themselves directors; or people whose only goal is to make money, and still dare call themselves producers; it was, to put it mildly, fucking orgasmic to see someone to whom those thoughts would never even occur unless brought up by someone else.

A few highlights of the Class (the majority of which could be found as a podcast online last week -- not sure if that's still up on the festival's website):

-- Scorsese is aware he's never really shot any sex scenes (not since Mean Streets, in any case), and he admits that it's because he wouldn't know how to film them. He does say he "would like to, someday. Maybe." In terms of how he shoots violence, he did point out that very often, when there is violence on the screen is the one time he'll deliberately move the camera very slowly, or not at all, and let the violence itself hit the audience, creating contrast with his usual, free-wheeling moving camera style. He also said he doesn't believe there is such a thing as "senseless" or gratuitous violence, and that it always, when shown, expresses a point of view, a reality.

-- Scorsese, famously, got into movies because his family were working class and never read books, films becoming his literature: "My parents were (...) not in the habit of reading books, so they only thing they could do with me was take me to the movie theater. Ultimately, the connection to cinema and movies was made emotionally, through my parents, through the movies they watched. That's the driving obsession, the emotional connection to film for me."

-- Scorsese mentioned a few of the films that impressed him when he grew up -- mentioning, of course, On The Waterfront as the first film that gave him a consciousness that film could be about him, and his friends, and their daily lives. He also dropped that "East Of Eden became almost a religious obsession with me."

-- He talked a bit about how he started realizing the power of film as a medium: "I began to wonder why I was feeling a certain way at a certain point in that film. And then I noticed a camera position or an actor. An example from Bonnie & Clyde: There’s a scene where Gene Hackman gets shot in the eye. And I imagined that as a close-up. I went to see the film again; it’s a medium shot. Why did I see it so close in my head? Sound effects, editing, position of the gun in the frame, all these things made me understand that you can actually construct images that tell a story. I became conscious of camera movement when I began to realize how certain scenes are made and why I was affected certain ways. But I really think it was through American musicals and the use of camera movement by Fellini, and the freedom of the camera in the French New Wave. I think it has more to do with choreography."

-- About what it takes to be a filmmaker: "You don’t really need to go to film school to learn how to watch a film. You can learn everything you need to know with your eyes. The only way you really learn is to make a film. You have to have an obsessive nature, I think. You have to want to make the film more than anything else in life, I’m sorry to say."

-- On what he learned making Mean Streets: "For (that) it took me three years. Harvey Keitel was a court stenographer at the time. After three weeks we ran out of money. I’d call him again 6 months later. He would complain: ‘I have a life, I have a job.’ What I learned is that at least we got through the process. And any film that you do is a marathon."

-- On what he learned working for Roger Corman (on Boxcar Bertha): "I learned discipline. Going there, doing your work, even when you don’t feel like it. What he did, is he taught me how to make a picture in 24 days."

-- On how he was introduced to Robert DeNiro (Scorsese has often said that, even though DeNiro hung out as a kid just a few blocks from him, they never really met, as just a few blocks downtown at that time was a whole different world): "It was at a Christmas dinner. He talked about all these people he knew. He used to hang out in a different group, but I remembered him. He was 16 and so was I back then. He knew the people that I made Who's That Knocking at My Door about. And he knew the people I wanted to make Mean Streets about. I didn’t know until many years later that his father was a painter, that we were not from the same class."

-- He also talked about improv, and how whenever he does improv, what he means is "improvisational dialogue" -- as in, he'll let the actors improv the lines, but not the whole scene, their objective remaining the same as was written in the script. He also says that improv he'll never shoot in a closeup -- that the whole idea of improv is to get people's reactions, the freshness and the realness that they suddenly have when they don't know what the other actor is going to do. Scorsese especially mentioned the "Funny how?" scene in Goodfellas, saying that the whole idea of letting Joe Pesci riff in that context was to create that genuine atmosphere of mixed camaraderie and menace, or fear, and that was achieved because everyone at that table, including Ray Liotta and Pesci himself, had no clue what Pesci was going to next -- when he was going to reveal the joke and how, and how far he would go before he did. As a result, the scene gets an energy it would never have had otherwise -- and if you look at the scene as it is in the film, you'll notice both shots (both the one on Pesci and the one on Liotta) are wide enough to include all the other actors, and their laughs, reactions, and interventions are what make the scene as funny, tense, and captivating as it is.

-- Scorsese also said that, more than just artistic reasons (although there were some), in the first place he started considering shooting Raging Bull in black and white because a) at that time he started realizing that color film faded more rapidly than B&W film, and he wanted his film to last, and b) four other boxing films (including Rocky 2 and The Champ) were coming out that year, all very colorful and mainstream, and he wanted his film to stand out.

-- He also said that several of his most-acclaimed projects (from the aforementioned Raging Bull to After Hours to The King Of Comedy to Cape Fear to The Departed) were projects he originally didn't want to do, but upon reading the script he found that one very little scene or one little theme would fascinate him and obsess him, and he would then be driven to develop it, make it the focus of the film, and that is what would push him to make the film.
Those are highlights, obviously, as the class lasted an information-packed 2 hours, but these are the ones that I took notes on, or that come to mind as I type this.

Our only other stop that day (other than the customary Film Market and Village stops) was a late night Directors' Fortnight of comedy Smiley Face, starring Anna Faris. Smiley Face had been one of the film we had wanted to see at Sundance, and missed because of scheduling issues, so when we learned that it was playing in Cannes, we made sure to catch it -- especially considering several reviews, in several countries, had gotten the habit of calling it "the best stoner comedy ever made".

What it was, to be honest, was a massive disappointment, and one of the unfunniest, stupidest, most poorly made films I have seen in my life (and Maz agreed). Directed by Gregg Araki, one of the indie world's favorite directors (and who, despite being in his mid-40s, sounds and acts like a freshman girl from USC), the film was also his first comedy, and it showed. The script showed glimpses of potential, but the dreadfully poor directing killed off any ideas it might've had. The plot, as in all stoner movies, was expectedly weak (girl gets massively stoned, goes on weird adventures), and so a lot relies on how the gags are set up and executed, and it was obvious Araki had put no thought whatsoever into that. Everything was shot exactly as written, with no rhythm, no variety, no invention, no visual ideas, and a dreadful, dreadful choice of music (how does loud, crappy techno-metal fit either comedy or being massively stoned?).

The acting was just as bad -- Anna Faris (whom I otherwise love) is in every shot, and wears the exact same standard-stoned expression in every single one of them. The rest of the cast (Adam Brody in a sad, sad cameo; John Krasinski in a "hey, I gotta pay the rent" cameo; and Danny Masterson in a "what the fuck were you THINKING?" cameo) is equally stiff, bored, and uninvolved. The film itself is a painful experience -- if you took someone off death row and made them watch Smiley Face, they'd probably ask to be put back on death row. And then executed early. The rest of the audience, reassuringly, didn't seem to enjoy the film either -- the first 20 minutes or so were welcomed with hysterical laughter, the next 20 minutes saw a couple chuckles, and after that the cinema was as silent as a yet-to-be-discovered Egyptian tomb. Dead dead dead dead dead.

And that was our second day in Cannes -- now re-dubbed, in my mind, the really cool place where you get to learn, over and over and over again, how many dreadful movies are made (and somehow, celebrated) in the world...

Cannes 2007 (Day One)

Hey there. Promised I'd write. :)

It's the last day of the Cannes Film Festival 2007, and Maz and I have been here since Wednesday morning, enjoying our first experience of the fest, and God...has it been something.

A little bit of background to explain how we ended up here in the first place: we've been going around festivals for a year now, since we graduated film school, basically attending whenever we could and were available in-between working jobs, trying to meet people and make contacts and just get the whole vibe of the different festivals (easier to do if you don't have the pressure of a film to screen and sell on the first time -- you're free to just make your way around and see what's up). So up until we now we had been to the Edinburgh Film Festival, the London Film Festival, Sundance, the Berlinale, and Tribeca. Knowing we'd be in Europe during Cannes anyway (as we had to come back for visa reasons), when it was announced that Martin Scorsese would be giving the Masterclass at this year's festival, I emailed my dad and asked if he knew where that might be taking place and how to get entry. I didn't have very high hopes -- Cannes is the most notoriously difficult festival to get into, as absolutely everything requires an official pass for entry -- but I thought I'd ask, in any case to maybe have the information for the following year.

What followed was typical of my dad -- within a couple of weeks of sending that first email, we had invitations to the Masterclass, full accreditation to all the events of the Festival, and tickets to 2 evening premieres (the ones where you have to show up in a tux or evening dress and walk up the red carpet and steps of the Palais du Festival). Let's just say people who run hotels have more influence than you think. :)

So, thanks to this amazing show of support from the parents (it's an investment, you could say), Mary and I landed in Nice on a BA flight Wednesday morning at 9.30, to spend about three days here. From Nice, you drive about 30 minutes to Cannes, where all of the action takes place. We got lucky to get here in definitely Riviera-esque weather (some years, clouds and drizzle overtake the festival), and it's been hot and sunny beach weather all the way. For those of you who don't know this part of the Riviera, it pretty much looks and feels like California -- only quieter, more quaint, and full of French people. The whole Cannes - Antibes - St. Tropez area is very much a bunch of holiday resorts, ranging from the luxury (most parts of Cannes) to the hip and trendy (St. Tropez, famous since Brigitte Bardot spent her summers doing the twist on its beaches in the 60s).

Mary and I set ourselves at the Amarante Hotel -- a really great little hotel, with swimming pool, and the most grumpy, hostile and unprofessional staff you could ever conceive (it's so nice being back in France...) -- and walked down the 10mn walk to the Hilton on the Croisette, where we were to meet the man who helped make it all possible, Richard Duvauchelle, who is a friend of my dad's and general manager of the Cannes Hilton.

What follows is our trip.

Wednesday

Morning -- We meet Richard outside the Hilton, since we're not allowed in yet -- as the Hilton is one of the festival hubs, and houses screenings and events for the Directors' Fortnight, you need either a festival pass or a room key to get in. Richard meets us and escorts us to his office, where he has all our stuff -- and it turns out all of it is even better than we expected. The Masterclass tickets are VIP tickets -- which means we get to enter the room before everyone else, and are guaranteed good seats. He has two tickets to each of that evening's premieres for us (more on that later). He has our passes to the Film Market and daytime screenings. And, completely unexpectedly, he also has two invitations for a party that evening, at the Hotel du Cap in Cap d'Antibes (THE most exclusive hotel you could think of -- for instance, this year, Sharon Stone, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, amongst others, are staying there; and as we would learn later, rooms cost over a $1,000 a night, and much more for suites, people book months in advance, and management accepts nothing but cash), a party hosted in honor of Sharon Stone's AIDS fundraising efforts. (In the end, Sharon Stone never showed, and no kids with AIDS were invited -- but I'm sure they appreciated. *clears throat*)

We have lunch with Richard, and during lunch bump into Hubert Watrinet, one of the managing directors of the Directors' Fortnight, who gives us invitations to come anytime and have drinks in the Directors' Fortnight lounge, and also entry to whichever films of their selection they we'd like to see. For free.

And speaking of free, the Hilton is definitely a place we'll be coming back to every day -- they have all the daily trades (from the Hollywood Reporter to Variety to The Business) free for the taking in the middle of the lobby. And you can imagine how we are with free film stuff...

Afternoon -- Leaving the Hilton with several hours until our 7pm premiere (at which we only need to get to by 6 or 6.15), Maz and I decide to take a walk down the Croisette and into the Film Market. The Croisette is the long avenue going down Cannes right by the seaside, and during the Festival, it's covered in film posters and billboards, either advertising films soon to be released (as this the case, this year, for Evan Almighty, Bee Movie, or 88 Minutes), or advertising films looking for distribution (from Japanese films in the festival to Ealing Studios' upcoming crapfest St. Trinians), or even films on which not a single minute of pre-production has yet been spent and still looking for financing (most notably Roman Polanski's Pompeii, rumored to be budgeted at $130 million and to star Orlando Bloom and Scarlett Johansson -- probably because their acting is so bad they're the perfect choice to play people who will be molded still in dry lava; or Righteous Kill, the first film to star DeNiro and Pacino together since Heat, from a script by the guy who wrote Inside Man, and which was just announced last week -- and for which they already have a poster, a tagline, and investment contact info). There's also some really weird stuff advertised here and there -- most especially this thing called Illegal Aliens, which apparently stars the late Anna Nicole Smith, and described by the IMDB as "Charlie's Angels goes sci-fi, as 3 aliens morph into super-hot babes and arrive to protect the Earth from the intergalactic forces of evil" (good stuff).

So you walk down this strip of road, right by the beach, and there's all these billboards on your right (on the city side). The beach side is a succession of private clubs and party areas set up under big white tents (most of them hosted by cosmetics companies), followed by what is known in Cannes as "the Village". Now the Village (full name being the International Village) is quite a cool thing -- it's a succession of little white booths of sorts, where every country in the world with a film industry (or at least every single one I could think of) has a booth, and where they all promote their films, their filmmakers, and their country as a location and clever-investment haven. Unsure of how much time we have, Mary and I just pop into a few -- namely the Irish Film Council one, which Mary really digs because of the slate of very cool-looking films they're promoting; and the UK Film Council one, where we get to pack up on free short film DVDs -- but I want to spend some time later going into some of the ones I know very little about, African countries and Asian countries, and learn more about their incentives and their film industries and what's going on with them, just to get an idea of how international film is at this point. We also try getting into the American booth -- which is the only one that's the size of four booths, as indicated by its name, the American Pavilion, and by the fact that the flag dangling outside it is 4 times the size of any other flag on the strip -- but get turned down after the entrance area, as the American Pavilion is, also, the one and only Village booth to have security procedures and allow entrance only to authorized members. I see a pattern here...

From there on we move to the Film Market itself, which is housed under the main screening room at the Palais des Festivals, and is the biggest, most impressive film market you could think of -- it covers something like three full floors, and EVERYONE you could think of as a booth, of varying sizes, from big US houses like Lionsgate to little Indian production companies whose sole distribution prospect is a straight-to-video shop in Slough. It's fun walking around -- people mistakes us for buyers and try and invite us to buyer screenings of their Jesse Metcalfe-starring jungle epics -- but it serves mostly as a reminder of how many really, REALLY crappy films actually get made out there (this festival as a whole will keep reminding us of that).

After an hour or so of wandering, we head back to the hotel for a bit of rest and regrouping before our premieres. I take a quick look at the schedules, and am a bit disappointed -- most of the films we were itching to see here, such as The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, Sicko, No Country For Old Men or My Blueberry Nights, are long gone and have stopped screening, so we won't be able to see them. But then again, this is a film festival, so the idea is to see things we wouldn't see otherwise -- maybe this is a blessing in disguise...

Evening -- Maz and I fall asleep -- we just got back from New York 36hrs before flying to Nice, and jet lag is still munching away at us. Luckily, we wake up in time to make our premiere, and with plenty of time to get changed and ready, too. Maz looks really really good in her evening dress (hubba hubba), and I get to pop on my brand new tux -- and even though I forgot cufflinks, and don't know how to tie my bow tie, even I have to admit it doesn't look half bad. So far so good.

Part of the fun of a Cannes premiere is apparently to walk down a bit of the Croisette beforehand, to experience not only all the hubbub, but to have a souvenir picture taken -- even before you reach the red carpet, dozens of photographers jump at you, asking you to pose (and you should've seen Mary's face when one of them asked her to "turn around and give her a little Edie look over her shoulder"), and then handing you a receipt for you to come see the pictures the next day and decide if you want to buy one. Since our hotel is on the wrong side of the Festival, we take the hotel shuttle to the Hilton and walk from there. The shuttle ride is quite fun -- our driver, who was also our bellboy the previous day, for some reason snarls at us every time he says us (and then asks for a tip!), and drives like an utter madman; and Mary spends the whole of the trip helping me improvise a decent-looking bow tie knot for me. It works out well -- it ends up looking like a proper bow tie -- and we get to the Hilton with time to spare.

Then starts the walk. As promised, it's a bit crazy. Photographers literally throw themselves at you, yell at you, taunt you, maybe even insult you a bit if you won't stop for them -- and them being French, the fact that you're trying to make a screening time makes no difference -- stopping for them, in their eyes, should be your absolute priority, and you're a dastardly turd if you don't (despite the fact that, as Maz and I learned the next day, 19 out of 20 of their pictures were absolutely horrible). The other thing that's quite fun is the people hustling for tickets -- like in any other festival -- only here, because of the dress code, people have to be in tuxedos and evening dresses when they do it. Which means that, all the way down to the steps, you keep having 20- to 30-year olds in rented tuxes and night-of-my-life prom dresses pop up at you, asking if you've got an extra ticket, begging you to. It's an odd thing.

Anyway, the walk itself takes about 10 minutes, and then you're at the red carpet. You go through security (cops, barriers, ushers), and then you slide onto the red carpet, feet away of someone famous (if you're lucky -- in our case the most famous person on the carpet was French actress Helene de Fougerolles), and then take that 5 minute stroll down the carpet and up the steps. It's a bit of a kick, but it's not as mind-bending as many people say -- the photographers (also all in tuxedos and formal wear, which is awesome) don't care much about you, it's a quicker walk than people say, and as soon as you reach the steps you're just hurried up by a bunch of rude ushers and policemen (ah, French people...), so you can get in and stop clogging traffic (even if there's no traffic to speak of). The Palais des Festivals itself is a lovely building, all marble and glass and escalators, and once you reach the inside of the screening room, you're just shown to your cushy little red seat and you can wait for the movie by watching everyone walk in on the red carpet on the big screen. The last people to walk in on the red carpet are the director and cast of the night's film, who are then introduced to the audience, get a courtesy standing ovation even if though they haven't done anything worth applauding yet (and the Festival forces you to give a "standing" ovation -- the filmmaker and cast enter from the middle of the room, below the balconies, so that, wherever you're seated in the theater, you have to stand to see where they walk in from). And then the film begins...

"The Edge Of Heaven", dir. Fatih Akin -- Our first film was the world premiere of German-Turkish director Fatih Akin, whom I had never heard of before that day, but is apparently famous as one of Europe's most exciting young filmmakers. The film, divided in three segments ("Yeter's Death", "Lotte's Death", and "The Other Side"), tells the story of three families, one of them German, one of them Turkish, and one of them German-Turkish, and how their lives intersect when tragedy strikes each of them. The film takes place between Germany and Istanbul, and was apparently intended as a piece on East-West tensions, and on life, death, and forgiveness. It got solid and up reviews the next morning in the trades, and is supposed to be one of the 5 or 6 best films in the Official Competition this year...
...and we hated it. It's slow, it's dull, it's completely devoid of any human emotion other than stilted, cliched ones. The acting is absolutely dreadful across the board (exception made for Patricia Ziolkowska, who's actually quite good), and every single plot development can be predicted five minutes before it happens (doesn't help that the titles of each of the segments give away their endings, either). It's shot like an average student film -- terribly lit, to the point that some of it looks like DV rather than film. It's self-indulgent -- every single shot lasts 5 seconds too long, and you could cut a solid 45 minutes out of the film and not lose anything (on the contrary, it'd gain strength in the bargain). It's not a clever take on cultural clashes, or forgiveness, either -- you could call it intellectual, but not intelligent. In the end, all it comes up with is "it takes the loss of someone or something for us to realize that we need to get past our differences and just love each other". No fucking shit, dude. I'm glad you made a 120-minute snorefest to let us all know. All in all -- not a terrible film, but one heck of a massive disappointment.

"Intermission" -- between the end of the first film and the beginning of the second, at 10pm, you get about a half-hour for dinner and a bit of a rest, so what Maz and I did was find the first little beach vendor shack and buy a couple of sandwiches and Cokes, and we had a seat on one of the benches right by the beach and talked about how crap the film was (ah, good times...). On the way out, a couple of photographers still walk up to you and try and get you to pose for a couple pictures, but by this time in the evening it's easier to get them to leave you alone, as by now they seem pretty much bored with themselves too. Then it's 9.30, and it's time to go back in and enjoy a second film, in our case...

"The Man From London", dir. Bela Tarr -- The new film of Hungarian director Bela Tarr, The Man From London is apparently an adaptation from a George Simenon novella. I say "apparently", because of the 30mn of the film that we saw, nothing -- and I mean NOTHING -- happens.
The bad signs started when Bela Tarr (looking every inch the sleazy, self-involved European "artist") walked in to his ovation, and made a nice show of standing in front of his seat and going through an obviously prepared routine of a) looking surprised, b) looking ashamed, yet as if this is something that happens to him every time he walks into a cinema, a restaurant, or even his own bathroom, c) "begging" the audience to sit down. All of which while standing up and grinning like a Fat Cat. (Short aside -- am I the only one to hate the whole "begging people to sit down" thing? C'mon. If you really wanted them to sit down, give them a nod, a thank you gesture, another nod or salute-type thing, put your hand on your heart to show you're touched or something, and then just fucking sit down. )
The film itself is shot in gorgeous black-and-white. That's the one good thing you can say about it: The film itself is shot in gorgeous black-and-white. The first shot is nearly 15 minutes long. Why? No reason -- it's just a static camera that pans left and right to cover the "action". Only there's no action to speak of. The second shot lasts an extra 7 minutes. All in all, that's nearly 25 minutes of film gone by, and this is the action that happens in those 25 minutes: a man on a boat is given a briefcase and leaves the boat. The man who gave him the briefcase also leaves the boat. Two men fight on the docks and one of them is pushed into the water, never to resurface. The other man walks into a hotel. That's it. 25 minutes, two shots, and that's ALL that happens (never mind the fact that the shots seem like two long shots, but pan over black every few seconds, so they could've been just intercut takes, completely negating any technical mastery you could try and see in them).
Halfway through all of this, people in the audience started uncomfortably laughing. So little was happening on screen that the balcony started erupting with applause every time something (a guy opening a door, for instance -- literally) did happen. And then people slowly started walking out. One by one, then two by two, then dozen by dozen. We found ourselves in the middle of three near-empty rows, Mary having fallen asleep (for ten minutes -- and when she woke up she had missed, oh, well, nothing), and eventually walked out too. We met dozens of people in the lobby, plenty of them shaking their heads, some of them almost ashamed by the damn thing. We overheard people saying things such as "I don't know -- some people might like it, but if you ask me, it's a piece of shit", and if anyone overheard us, they would've heard something along the same lines, only even more flowery.
Turns out we weren't the only ones. Half the audience walked out, and the next morning reviews were glowing -- the Hollywood Reporter called the film "unwatchable", saying that any of his merits lived "only in the director's mind". Metro's review was replaced by an apology by the reviewer, explaining that he fell asleep in the middle of the first shot. Bloomberg.com says the film feels like "a self-parody", called it "less than convincing" and "laborious". The best review came from Time Out -- who managed to find the film a positive experience thanks to its "sound design" and "metaphysical poetry". *insert snoring sounds here*

After walking out, Maz and I spent twenty minutes or so by the Cinema de la Plage, the big screen on the beach showing free movies every evening, and watched the end of "All That Jazz". We then called Richard, who was supposed to pick us up in his car to drive us to Cap d'Antibes for the night's party, and let him know that we were out early, so that he wouldn't have to wait until 1 in the morning to pick us up. We met him in the Hilton, got in the car, and headed to the last part of our first evening in Cannes...

The Quintessentially Party at the Eden Roc -- The Eden Roc Hotel du Cap, in Cap d'Antibes, is -- to put it simply -- the most exclusive hotel in France. It looks like a great big Riviera mansion, overlooking the Mediterranean, and you get to it by driving through the town of Cap d'Antibes, through big iron gates, and up a winding drive through beautifully lit pine trees. The hotel has an outdoor pool right looking right over the ocean, a private beach, a private jetty, private everythings.

When we got there, it was about 12.30 in the morning, and the place was locked down with bouncers and security -- people checking invitations, keeping non-invited people out, the whole nine yards. You drive up to the hotel entrance, and your car is taken away from you by one of a half-dozen valets in white jackets. Another blonde in her 20s hectically checks your name off on the list -- my first time having my name on a list! -- and shows you downstairs to where the party is taking place, on this half-indoor half-outdoor terrace overlooking the pool and the sea, lit with discreet little spotlights and the occasional flaming torch (a couple of which I almost tripped while wandering around).

Now as I might've mentioned, the main purpose of the party was to serve as an after-party to the amFar AIDS fundraising dinner at the Moulin des Mougins restaurant earlier that evening, where rich people paid $1,000 a head to have dinner with Sharon Stone and other famous buddies, and also participated in an auction. So, for instance, people paid up about $200,000 for Kylie Minogue to perform two songs for them; a woman paid $350,000 for a kiss with George Clooney; and people in general paid to watch Dita Von Teese strip on a giant stick of lipstick (true, and oh so Freudian, story). After the event (which raised nearly $7 million total, so well done everyone involved), people were invited to come to the Eden Roc, where Quintessentially (a "lifestyle assistance" company -- ie, a club you pay to be a member of, and who sponsors parties, opera shows, luxury travel, and other luxury things you can exclusively take part in) and a cosmetics company hosted an open bar party for people to unwind at.

It was a fun Hollywood crowd -- in the sense that 9 out of 10 people there had no talent, but plenty of money -- and most of our evening was spent by the bar, having a few drinks, and people-watching. People-watching that involved both watching the "regular" people, studying their behavior, their dress, the facades they put up to prove that they belong -- but mostly involved watching the famous people who walked in just inches away from us, and judgmentally decide how good (or bad), and nice (or grumpy) we thought they looked.

The first one to walk in, at about 1 in the morning, was Victoria Silvstedt. Now, for those of you who don't know her, Victoria Silvstedt used to compete as an Olympic skier for the Swedish ski team, won Miss Sweden, became a model for Chanel, Christian Dior and Armani, and reached worldwide fame by appearing nude in Playboy, becoming a Playmate Of The Year, making softcore Playboy movies, and so on so forth. Since then he's done the usual Swedish-fantasy-girl post-Playboy stuff (hosting Eurotrash in the UK, posing for FHM, being a spokesperson for Guess jeans), but every guy in the world between 15 and 35 will know her as a Playmate. (Proof: All the information in this paragraph I stole from her Wikipedia page. Except the Playboy stuff, which I already knew. *clears throat*).

So she's the first to walk in. Following her, in little 10 to 15 minute intervals, were:

-- Harvey Weinstein and girlfriend Georgina Chapman. As expected, Harvey looks like a big, slow ape (hint: if they ever make another live action Tarzan, Harvey should play the grumpy ape who adopts little Tarzan), and you can tell from the first time you lay eyes on him that he's not a nice dude. He spent most of the party walking around, schmoozing and chatting, mostly with people who came to him (a sign of power, I guess), making sure trophy girlfriend Georgina Chapman stayed right by him all the way.
-- Brett Ratner and his date, Random Airhead Model #7. Ratner's famous for one-night-standing with anything he lays eyes on that has boobies (good thing he kept clear from Harvey Weinstein, then), and he walked in acting like a smug, arrogant, spoilt brat (behavior he'd have every other time we saw him round Cannes, too). Ratner (who directed the Rush Hour films, the dreadful Red Dragon, and X-Men 3, also known as the worst super-hero film Joel Schumacher had nothing to do with) essentially acted like he should be Weinstein's offspring -- moves like an ape, with no subtlety or grace whatsoever, and acts with such arrogance, such I-own-you-all-ness, that you just can NOT help being put-off by him. But it's also tainted with such obvious insecurity -- like a middle-class suburban kid who's not only used to getting everything he wants, but knows he should bully people into giving it to him, because if he waits for them to give it to him based on his merits alone, he probably ain't gonna get it. But anyway -- he walked in, wandered around for 25-30 minutes, and then walked out with his blonde.
-- Then came Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell and Tracie Thoms (also known as the girls from QT's Death Proof), who seemed quite sweet, and basically just stuck together by the bar, had a drink or two, and chatted like good mates before disappearing. Rosario Dawson also happens to look absolutely gorgeous -- for anyone who never happened to notice it on screen, trust me, it's there.
-- After them came Scott Caan, Jimmy's kid, of Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen fame. Amazingly short, and dressed and moussed up like an extra in Saturday Night Fever, he did actually seem like a fun guy -- but only stayed a few minutes.
-- Then came burlesque queen Dita Von Teese. I only caught a couple of glimpses of her, but she looks as white as you'd imagine -- like a little porcelain statue. I don't know if she's deliberately aware of what it means, but I think it's (other than the fact that she's beautiful and, probably, a great show woman) one of the reasons she's as famous as she is. She looks utterly unique, and beyond that, it's a look that has none of the vulgarity, of the commonness, of your average burlesque stripper, all blonde locks and big tits and glittery thongs. She looks...well...period. I think that that, the name (Dita Von Teese -- bloddy genius)...the woman's got a great sense of what sells. And it's interesting because, is that a good thing? If she's got such intelligence, such a sense of showmanship and salesmanship, could it be put to better uses than burlesque? But what better use is there than burlesque (he he)? And how come all the women who seem to be really intelligent, really cunning, not only happen to be stunning, but know that that's their number one currency, and they manage to see it as such, while still putting what seems like healthy boundaries on it being seen as the only thing they have? Obviously, that means that our society is a society where men are only comfortable with strong women whose currency is their sexuality (it allows us to believe that they don't have any other assets), or who, like those boardroom women in suits and short hair, are so devoid of sexuality that we can feel comfortable with the idea that they have no sexuality to use against us. But then is it a good thing for women to play along with that? Part of me feels it's the best thing -- sexuality is like anything else, intelligence, charisma, beauty...no one's asking you to sleep with people, but if you can use it as an asset, then you should, and maybe people will only be comfortable with it when people do. Or maybe not, maybe it debases something. Does that make any sense? Probably not. Just rambling. Bottom line is: she seems like a damn clever woman, and I'd love to sit at a dinner or a table or something where she would speak, and discuss, and where a conversation could be had, get into that head, see if she's got an awareness of all these things.
-- Then came Claudia Schiffer. Looked gorgeous, even though she definitely is starting to look her age (37). Actually she looks a little older than her age, because of all the effort she seems to be putting into looking younger. But she was smiling, and graceful, and even though she didn't stay long, she got her pictures taken by the press right in front of us, giving Maz and I a fun little couple of minutes discussing how fun it'd be to unzip her dress and pull it down right there and then. As you obviously did not hear in the news, we decided against it.
-- Last came Kerry Washington (of Ray and The Last King Of Scotland fame), who seemed lovely, but barely had she walked in that she stepped on her dress and tripped right over one of the picture lights and tumbled right...onto...Mary. No one got hurt, but it got Maz feeling worried that people thought for some reason she might've engineered it. He he.

And that was all our famous people. Sharon Stone never really showed -- despite Richard desperately getting ETAs for her arrival every five minutes, checking in with photographers, asking the hosts -- and neither did Woody Allen, who had apparently been invited, and whom I would've loved to have seen. In any case, it was a really fun night -- famous people, lots of people-watching, a good bar...

And that was the end of the night. We popped home, collapsed to sleep, and looked forward to the next day...

What Just Happened?

Man, it's been a long time, hasn't it? Haven't blogged since the Oscars. That's late February to mid-May. Did you miss me?

Well, here's a little bit of a fill-in -- about two weeks after the Oscars, Maz and I popped back over to New York, to stay for three months, and try our luck and see how things would go back in the US of A. They didn't start too well -- we had some screw-ups with the places we were supposed to stay at, and essentially spent the first week of our stay in New York jumping from hotel to hotel (including, unfortunately, several nights at the Penn, where we had to change rooms twice due to unexpected rodent roommates, and where every trip to the front desk in the morning was like attending the Rudest Clerk Ever Olympics). Then Mary spent a week at our friend Jenny's, which was lovely, but still didn't solve the problem of our having been back for two weeks and still living out of our suitcases, and I spent a week in L.A., sleeping on a deflated air mattress on the floor of the most disgusting apartment I've ever been in (there was also four of us sleeping in there at the same time, when it's got enough to room for one). We then managed to find a sublet for a month in Gramercy, on 22nd, which was good -- the neighborhood's lovely, and even though, there again, we had a mouse friend, the stove was dysfunctional and nearly blew up on us (true story), and we both had to sleep on couches because the radiator in the bedroom threatened to explode (it did -- every half hour or so, it'd start hissing, and then start spitting boiling hot air right in the direction of the bed). But we did all right, we made the best of our month, and now we're staying in a new sublet back down in the East Village for a couple of months. Which has its own problems -- the dumbass who leased it to us is in Brazil, hasn't been in the apartment for months, and hasn't bothered checking that the TV and wifi she promised would work, well...really don't. But there's worse things in the world, heh?

Anyway, surprisingly enough, after all the hotel crap, things went fairly well -- Maz enrolled in classes at HB Studios (the famed Stella Adler school), taking acting classes, directing actors classes, and improv classes, all to improve her actor direction. Which is not only a very smart move, but also a really balsy one -- never mind how dismissive everyone is of actors, it takes a lot of courage to go up on a stage and perform in front of an audience, baring pretty much all. Especially if, like Mary (or me), you don't have a visceral need to do it, and know you're probably going to suck. So I'm really really proud of her for that (there's more details to that story, of course, but they're hers to tell).

On my end, I got lucky enough to get...work on a film set! One of the producers I've been eyeing to potentially work for, a man called Art Linson (who produced such films as Fight Club, Heat, The Untouchables, The Edge, This Boy's Life, Scrooged and Fast Times At Ridgemont High), recently announced that he'd be going ahead with a fictional adaptation of his true life books, entitled What Just Happened? Now I've been excited about this, not only because of my respect for Linson, but also because I love his books -- how well-written, funny, and honest they are -- and because his stories are truly great Hollywood stories (the most famous one being how, when shooting The Edge, Alec Baldwin -- the thoughtless little pig! -- turned up on set overweight and with a Santa Claus beard, despite having been hired to play the young sexy lead, and refused to shave or lose weight, claiming being fat and hairy was his "artistic integrity"). So what I did is I tracked down the ADs, who happened to be Michael Lerman and Peter Thorell (institutions in the indie AD world, if you will, having, amongst them, AD'd Marc Forster's films all the way since Monster's Ball, Garden State, Far From Heaven, You Can Count On Me, Frida and more of the like), and both were amazingly nice. Michael passed on my calls to Pete, who then passed on my calls to their key PA, Chris Gibson, who gave me a shot, and told me that I could come in and work.

Now by the time this had happened -- barely two weeks, right before we left the UK for New York -- the picture of the film itself had gotten more precise, and even more exciting. It turned out that Barry Levinson (of leepers, Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam, Toys, Wag The Dog and Bugsy fame) would direct the film, and that it would star Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Catherine Keener, Michael Wincott, Stanley Tucci and John Turturro. That's about as cool as life gets, man. So I got hired to work for a day on the film's first day in L.A., which was a great experience, filming on the Paramount backlot, and then got to work for a full three weeks in Connecticut on the end of the shoot, effectively working on the first day and the last day of a feature film shoot for the first time of my life. Which was a wicked, wicked experience. And the reason why I haven't had the time to blog much.

Now, if what you're expecting is a lot of inside scoop, leaks and the like -- I'm the wrong guy. I have a script at home, and the only person other than me who's read it is Maz, and that's about it. Is the film going to be good? I don't know. It's hard to tell. As far as I'm concerned, both Levinson and Linson are in a rut in their careers right now -- concerning the former, his last two films are Man Of The Year and Envy, and in my opinion if those two films had been his two FIRST then no one would've hired him to do a third. And as for Linson, he seems to be stuck with David Mamet and Brian DePalma, both of whom haven't had the best of times at the movies lately. And I will say this -- I don't think our script was as good as the books. But the books are terrific. Other than that -- every take I've managed to see on the monitor looked really funny, and a good deal of them looked gorgeous to boot. And there's a lot of unknown factors in a film like this -- it's a film about Hollywood, so it could go either way, either self-indulgently obscure or revealingly funny; DP Stephane Fontaine (who shot The Beat That My Heart Skipped) was pretty much shooting his first Hollywood feature here; Robert DeNiro doing comedy is always a gamble, whether it's going to end up like Midnight Run or whether it's going to be another Rocky & Bullwinkle (I personally feel like it's going to be the former, based on what I've seen of this, and I think Midnight Run is one of his coolest, funniest performances ever)... But I'm excited. Really excited.

What I am going to share is all my random thoughts about filming this, about how it felt to be on it, how it feels to be done with it, how the people were, and what kind of thoughts it brought up in me about filmmaking in general. So here we go.

a) Location managers and scouts are amazing people. There's some places in Connecticut that we shot in -- I have no clue how anyone found them. They're in little towns, up a back street and at the end of the drive, and they're PERFECT (not only in terms of look, but in terms of room to park the trucks, power to plug the lights into, and so on). Places you didn't even think existed, they find. And that's mind-boggling to me -- how do they do it? Contacts? Pure scouting? Calling up local film offices and asking? So one of my soon-to-do things is to try and find a location scout who'd be willing to let me tag along for a week or two of work, and just see how they do what they do. Which I'm really excited about.

b) Most of the time, when there's a fuck-up in a shot, it'll be because of a crew member. You have no idea how many times you'll yell "ROLLING!" at the top of your lungs on a set (not just you, but all 8 of the other PAs, too), and the grip standing right next to you will still walk right onto the set, speaking really loudly, and then act as if no one told him the camera was rolling. If there's ever a shot in a film, where one of the people in the background is just standing there and staring at the action -- it's definitely not an extra, and it's probably not a passerby. Odds are it's a dumbass crew member. Crews -- and by this I mean the guys who aren't involved with the actual shooting part, who are more involved in the set-ups and so on, and often, the guys who tend to be 30 or 40 or 50 and blase because they're still stuck being grips, being drivers, being best boys -- those people in the crew have a surprisingly limited respect for filmmaking. No matter what the country -- be it England or the US. They're not happy with being their age and still having people tell them not to do. They're not happy to see directors and actors get a certain treatment, when they have to lug shit around. And they also know that they have a certain amount of power -- because you need them to work fast to make your schedule. So they know they have you by the balls. They can bitch, be rude, and talk about nothing but their paychecks, overtime, and how much of an asshole everybody is, and you can't really do much to them. Of course they don't behave that way when the above-thems are around -- but if you're a PA, well...expect a tidal wave of bitterness. And expect them to walk through a shot, or spoil a lock-up by yelling "jokes" to each other, at least every other day.

c) Robin Wright Penn is, well...amazingly lovely. There's a story about her I won't tell here, but there is one I will: the first day she was on set when I was working, I had to run a Starbucks order (my first! woo-hoo!) for her and Stanley Tucci. And when I got her order, and brought it to make-up where she was at the time, she was amazingly genuine, grateful, open and nice. Conversation went something like this:

ME: Aaand there you go.
HER: Oh, thank you! Wow, who did that run?
ME: ...I did.
HER: My God, that's so nice. Thank you so much!
ME: Um...you're welcome.

Just DISARMINGLY nice. And the natural, genuine kind of nice -- not Lindsay Lohan trying to be "one of us" nice. And it's all the more surprising because Robin Wright Penn just, very simply, seems like a strong woman -- like she's been there, done that, and has thought about it at length. And she's stunning. Absolutely stunning. So. Yes. She's a very nice person. :)

d) It was a great shoot. That's the thing that'll stick with me strongest. Starting with the L.A. part of the shoot -- which was just a film geek's wet dream version of your first day on a Hollywood film set, considering it was DeNiro, and we shot on the Paramount backlot, on a beautiful California day that ended with a gorgeous sunset behind palm trees. And it had everything you'd imagine a studio shoot would have -- golf buggies, movie stars, soundstages, the works. And it ended magnificiently in the Connecticut part of the shoot, with me going from being promised a day's work, to working full-time, to being put on the crew list. Not only that, but I also spent most of those three weeks essentially acting as Robert DeNiro's 2nd set PA, meaning that while his first set PA, Dan Cone, would be staying with him, keeping him notified of the schedule and the sides, and bringing him water, I would be in charge of everything else -- getting his food ready, getting him the lunch menu, getting his espressos, and so on so forth. Which, when you're like me and have grown up around Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta and Johnny Boy and Jimmy Conway and Neil McCauley and young Vito Corleone and Ace Rothstein and Al Capone and Harry Tuttle and Noodles Aaronson and Rupert Pupkin and Michael Vronsky and Jimmy Doyle, and happen to think that the man is probably the greatest actor alive, just makes every SINGLE workday a pleasure and a dream come true. Nice guy, too. (And if all those names I just shot out don't mean anything to you, that's Bob -- he, calling him Bob -- in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Heat, The Godfather II, Casino, The Untouchables, Brazil, Once Upon A Time in America, The King Of Comedy, The Deer Hunter and New York, New York. And that's only half of the guy's great performances and films -- can anyone say "perfect career"?)

e) I wonder if I'd get depressed on a location shoot. On this one, I was lucky enough to commute back in forth with Manhattan (a bitch of a 2hr commute, often longer, but with two advantages: a. you get to see a deserted Grand Central Terminal every morning at 5am, the rising sun just barely shining through the archways, and I grew up day dreaming of such perfect New Yorkness, and b. you get to sleep in your own bed, with your own friends and close ones around). If you're an actor or a director or a producer, a location shoot is probably fine -- you get set up in a fancy hotel, or an apartment, or a house, and you have a driver and you just go about your life as you would anyway. The background just changes. If you're a crewmember, a PA, you end up just being set up in a succession of Holiday Inns or Marriotts, the kind of dimly lit, dreary little traveling salesman hotels, where a luxury room means you get the previous day's USA Today on your doorstep every morning. And this being Stamford, CT -- and considering you finish shooting between 7 and 10pm, and are so exhausted that if you went to see one of the three movies the local theater is playing you'd probably fall asleep during the previews anyway -- all that seems left for people to do is sit in their rooms and either watch TV or drink beers together. And once you've had enough beers, maybe venture out to a bar or two and try and pick up a skanky 20-year old. To bring back to the Holiday Inn, where you can't do much to her, because you've got a fellow crew member bunking in the bed next to yours. So you go to sleep -- and repeat the next evening. You could read, of course, but you've already been reading all day on set while you waited -- and on a film set, 8 out of 10 minutes are spent waiting -- so you don't quite feel like it when you get back. And this goes on for a month. Fair enough if you have a bunch of fun crew members around, and if you don't have an ambition that stretches beyond PAing -- in which case it'll have plenty of time to devour you in that dark, smelly little hotel room. But what if you do...?

f) Night shoots are hard. I'd never had one until the last night on this production, when we were on set in Stamford, CT from 6pm to 6am on a Friday night, filming nearly five pages of script, on the Stamford high street, with Bob DeNiro, Robin Wright Penn, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro and 75 background actors all in attendance. Your body doesn't like it. You get exhausted because you need food -- since you've skipped dinner -- and as soon as you eat, you get sleepy because, well, that's what your body is used to after dinner. And Friday night traffic control is a nightmare -- ever tried controlling crowds when they're drunk, loud, and whose every male member is trying to impress the female member nearest to him? Well, try controlling that same crowd when it knows that every 10 or 12 minutes or so, for the whole night, Robert DeNiro is going to step out onto the sidewalk just feet away from them. And your job, your privilege of a job, is to stand between him and them, and make sure they shut up, don't video him, don't take photos of him, stay behind a certain line and generally just don't make a sound whatsoever. Soon enough, one of them's going to shriek or pull out a camera phone, and then they're all going too -- and then you get the blame for not being able to control them, and then you snap back to whoever blamed you, and next thing you know it's 2am and everyone is in a bad mood. Suddenly all you want is to be out of there, and this being a film set, everything around you moves excruciatingly slow. Works to make you feel even Jim Dandy-er. And there's still 4 hours to go...

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That's my basic thoughts that I can think of now, so I apologize if they don't make much sense. I hope they do. You probably won't come back to this blog if I keep going two months without blogging, and then post a bunch of nonsense. Bad customer service.

In any case, that's pretty much what's been filling 18 hours of my day every day for the past three weeks. Plenty more is new -- Mary and I are coming back to Europe for a two-week period, the highlights of which will be, on the one hand, getting to celebrate our birthdays with out families, and on the other hand, going to Cannes for three days, with passes, entry to Martin Scorsese's masterclass, and (knock on wood) more goodies. But I'll talk about all of that as it happens, as I don't want to brag about it now, then see it never happen, and then have to make up a story for why it never did, all in an effort to save face. So for now, let's leave it at what we know for sure: Going to Cannes, Scorsese masterclass, and maybe more.

What else is new? The short film is coming along. It's been an incredible fight from the night that mugging happened -- it's about as much money and time as I was planning to spend on a first feature, not on a short that I originally conceived, and still do conceive, as the first, and least ambitious, in a series of shorts that'll work as a calling card, reel, and early track record as a producer. But the film is coming together -- I have a terrific sound designer within a week of finishing it, a terrific (and, if I remember right, award-winning) USC composer working on a score, and even though we've toned down our color correction effects a slight bit, I'm still looking to come away with a great-looking film. That, and this amazingly talented guy called Brian Murtaugh is designing our main and end credits, and is doing a fantastic job at it -- expect some of his non-used designs to pop up on film festival postcards and posters (that's how good they all are). It's a lesson to me in how long, slow, and expensive rebuilding a film's soundscape from the ground up can be, especially when you can in no way afford to stop and spend the bulk of your time on the film -- when it has to be an after hours, evenings-and-weekends type thing, always delaying, always pushing back, always convincing and hounding and cajoling the people with the resources so they'll help you out and throw you a bone. But we're getting amazingly close now, and will be done in June, and as such we'll be able to make most of the summer film festival deadlines, and all of the early fall ones, all around the world. If you were cast or crew and are still in New York, expect a cast-and-crew screening somewhere in Manhattan during the month of June -- and hopefully a few festivals I might try and convince you to come out to, maybe to see the film and do some Q&Aing (knock on wood again, all together now), which would be a really, REALLY fantastic experience.

I've also started doing script reading and actual development notes for this management company in L.A. called The Collective, which has been great since they manage such people as Eddie Izzard, Emile Hirsch, Shareeka Epps, Dennis Hopper, Whoopi Goldberg, Forrest Whitaker, Michelle Rodriguez... I've been working with (for them, really) since February, and it's been really fun, especially considering a couple of the scripts I put input into might actually get made very soon (including one for comedian Katt Williams, which is exciting -- his stuff is SO obviously not my side of the tracks, but I can appreciate it, and it was a real kick for me to send my notes on the screenplay and see everyone involved actually agree with my notes and work with them -- it kind of proved to me that even if something's not right up my alley, hopefully I know enough about screenplay and film and have a good enough bullshit detector to improve it in some small way). That's been great because as much fun as it is going to be going to the cinema to see the films I've PA'd on, and as AMAZINGLY fun as it is going to see the films I'm an extra in (oh yes, you read that right -- I'm a battersman guard in one shot of The Golden Age, and a "film crew member" in the background of a crucial scene of What Just Happened?), it'd be great to see a film I've had some sort of creative input (however small) and see if it made a difference or not, if the choices work or not. It's the only true test, really -- you could be an amazing script reader or note-maker for years, and the second a film gets made based on your notes, maybe your notes suck. Maybe they work on the page and not on the screen. So it'd be interesting to see. That, and it'd be a validating experience. :)

On the paid work front, the upcoming goal is the same it's been for over six months now -- Indiana Jones 4. They start shooting June 18th, I know the first three geographic locations they'll be going to, and I know who the ADs are and how to get to them. So wish me luck...

That's all I can really think of as of this point -- I'm sure there's so much more I could rant and rave about (like Spider-Man 3 -- I personally think it's by far the best of the three. Bite me if you don't.; or like how Bron Bron is currently making us all proud, leading -- it's not quite done but I expect it to happen in the next couple of days -- the Cavs into the NBA Eastern Conference Finals and, who knows, maybe further), but this is probably long enough as is.

I hope you're all well (and if you're not, please let me know why and how, and we'll sort it out!), and see you next time -- when I'll be speaking to you...from Cannes!