Michael Dwyer has spent months of his life in the sun-kissed resort, watching films on your behalf. He reflects on 25 tough years
The 59th Cannes Festival opens on Wednesday night with the world premiere of The Da Vinci Code. I will be there, as I will for the duration, in my 25th consecutive year covering the world's most important film festival. Which adds up to spending 50 weeks of my life at the event. One or two people find this peculiar, but someone's got to do it.
Of course, many people think it's incredibly glamorous to be in the town for all that red-carpet pomp, those lavish parties and those wall-to-wall film stars. I've had more than a few offers from people willing to carry my notebook for me at the festival, and any time I telephone the office from Cannes I'm invariably asked if the weather is gorgeous.
It generally is balmy in Cannes in May, or so I've noticed as I've sped from one cinema to another and back to my hotel to write another feature and meet another deadline while an attractive party invitation lies forlorn and unused on the table. Only people who don't work at Cannes return home with suntans.
Every day presents an impossibly crowded diary. Press screenings begin at 8.30am, Saturdays and Sundays included, at the splendid 2,000-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière, in the Palais des Festivals. Despite the early hour they are always full, with many latecomers turned away.
Another competition film is shown to the press at 7pm each day, in the 1,000-seat Salle Debussy, next door. At these oversubscribed screenings I cherish the hard-won yellow circle on my press card, which allows priority access; those without one must wait until the last minute to be allocated any seats that remain.
The morning screenings are followed by press conferences with actors and directors. In my first year at Cannes, in 1982, I soon realised that they are generally useless, confounded by language problems as journalists struggle to express themselves and by obsequious eulogies from the floor.
I have been to them only when the subject has been newsworthy for the next day's paper, such as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, or if there has been an Irish angle, as when the director Ken Loach and the late Portadown-born critic Alexander Walker argued about Hidden Agenda, Loach's Northern Ireland drama.
Lazy hacks thrive on these press conferences, putting their tape recorders on the table, keeping their mouths shut and reporting the proceedings as the most intimate of personal interviews.
Talking to the Hollywood actors who come to Cannes is difficult, because, with 5,000 press accredited, one-to-one interviews are not easily acquired. As well as needing to be sought and arranged weeks in advance, they involve an investment in time, as the stars stay a good drive from Cannes, at the ultra-expensive Hotel du Cap.
Some interviewees - Cher, Jane Fonda and Clint Eastwood - have proved well worth the journey. Sean Penn, on the other hand, was in sullen form, comparing acting to walking through flames.
John Malkovich was worth the trip, but as his interviews were running late I was in danger of missing the screening of A Taste of Cherry, a favourite for that year's Palme d'Or. Helpfully, a hotel speedboat whisked me across the bay. I made the film, and it won the top prize.
My first experience of Hotel du Cap was in 1982, as a Cannes virgin. Neil Jordan's first film, Angel, was screening in the crowded festival market, where it was hailed as the most exciting discovery on show. To boost its profile, Sheamus Smith, later the Irish film censor, and John Boorman, the film's executive producer, organised a select party at the hotel, with the invaluable assistance of Pierre Joannon, Ireland's well-connected Honorary Consul General to France.
The guests included the film directors Bertrand Tavernier and Lewis Gilbert and the authors Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene. When Boorman's wife, Christel, introduced me to Greene as one of Ireland's best young writers, Greene, assuming I was a rising novelist, pretended he had heard of me, which, as well as being amusing, made me less nervous about meeting a great novelist who had been an outstanding film critic in his time. We enjoyed Irish smoked salmon, Irish whiskey and French champagne on a sunny balcony overlooking the Mediterranean.
A year later I learned a valuable lesson about Cannes parties when an English producer asked me to join him in crashing the party for Monty Python's the Meaning of Life. Arriving in jeans and T-shirts, we were mortified to see the guests seated in evening dress for a formal dinner while seals cavorted in a pool. I never again crashed a party at Cannes.
One of my favourite bashes was again poolside, 12 years later, for an alfresco dinner after the premiere of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, where three drag queens, precariously poised on stilettos atop adjacent diving boards, mimed to show tunes. Another favourite was in 1992, hosted by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant after the screening of Howard's End. Merchant cooked a sumptuous Indian lunch at a villa outside Cannes, serving it in the shade of a pine tree planted by Queen Victoria in 1901.
In 1982 - so long ago that the world premiere of ET: The Extra- terrestrial was the closing film - I was covering the festival for In Dublin magazine, then an innovative, young publication. The only other Irish people there were Ray Comiskey, at the time this newspaper's film critic - and a Cannes virgin like myself - and Smith. Now more than 200 Irish delegates go every year.
The Irish invasion began in 1986, for the premiere of Eat the Peach, a film written and produced by John Kelleher, who has since succeeded Smith as censor. The screening was followed by a legendary party in the nightclub of the upmarket Gray d'Albion Hotel; it attracted hundreds of guests and continued until dawn.
Ten years later, the post-screening party for The Van was more modest but still thoroughly entertaining. It was held in Morrison's Irish pub, where the fare, in keeping with the setting of the movie, was sausages and chips. In 1999, after the premiere of Damien O'Donnell's debut film, East Is East, the food at a lively beach party consisted of fish and chips - which was apt, as the film's Pakistani paterfamilias runs a chipper.
Many of the most enjoyable parties have been the least formal and fancy, such as a 1988 midnight rooftop shindig for Hairspray, where retro pop music blasted out as guests were fitted with beehive wigs. And some of the most entertaining evenings were purely spontaneous, memorably one very late night, at the then tacky Petit Majestic bar, when the late Joe Strummer got out his guitar and led all of us, including Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, in a rousing rendition of Guantanamera.
Anything can happen at Cannes. It may feel as if you're in Groundhog Day to arrive there each year, but there are always surprises, on screen and off. The great pleasure is seeing so many films before anyone else spreads the word - from ET and Missing in my first year to such gems as Paris, Texas, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, The Sacrifice, Jesus of Montreal, Exotica, Three Colours: Red, Pulp Fiction, LA Confidential, The Son's Room, Oldboy, Hidden, A History of Violence and L'Enfant.
Here's to a few more of that standard in the fortnight ahead.
Michael Dwyer begins his reports from the 59th Cannes Festival on Friday
BEST & WORST
MOST DESERVING PALME D'OR WINNERS I'VE SEEN
Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders, 1984
Sous le Soleil de Satan
Maurice Pialat, 1987
Farewell My Concubine
Chen Kaige, 1993
Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino, 1994
The Son's Room
Nanni Moretti, 2001
LEAST DESERVING WINNERS
The Ballad of Narayama
Shohei Imamura, 1983
A Taste of Cherry
Abbas Kiarostami, 1997
Eternity and a Day
Theo Angelopoulos, 1998
Dancer in the Dark
Lars von Trier, 2000
The Pianist
Roman Polanski, 2002
IRISH CONTENDERS
Only one film made in Ireland by an Irish director has been selected for the official competition at Cannes: Pat O'Connor's Cal, which won the best-actress award for Helen Mirren in 1984. The other Irish-made or Irish-directed competition selections have been Images (Robert Altman, 1972), for which Susannah York was named best actress; Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986), for which Bob Hoskins tied as best actor; The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996); and The General (John Boorman, 1998), for which Boorman was voted best director. Among the Irish films turned down by Cannes were My Left Foot and The Crying Game, which went on to score at the Oscars. On Thursday Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, filmed in Cork and Kerry with an Irish cast, will be shown in competition.
MANGE TOUT
Just as a film crew is said to march on its stomach, a good meal is always welcome at the end of a long day at Cannes. I discovered
La Mère Besson on my first visit to the town, and it remains my favourite.
I always go on my first and last night - and a few more times mid-festival, when I need a break. Run by the husband-and-wife, chef-and-manager team of Yves and Margaret Martin (right), this charming restaurant serves classical Provencal cuisine, including terrific daily specials, at prices that are remarkably reasonable by Irish standards. Unlike many Cannes restaurateurs, the Martins do not increase their prices for the festival.
The restaurant produced a fine cookbook, Ma Cuisine Provençale - well-thumbed chez Dwyer - which has more than 200 recipes for those who can read French.
Across the road is 3 Portes, where the food is of a high standard but more expensive.
Around the corner, on Rue du Commandant André (which
runs between the Croisette and Rue d'Antibes) is La Libera, a trattoria that is ideal if one has limited time between screenings. It's also very good value for money.
La Mère Besson, 13 rue des Frères Pradignac, 00-33-4-93395924;
3 Portes, 16 rue des Frères Pradignac, 00-33-4-93389170; Trattoria la Libera, 17 rue du Commandant André, 00-33-4-92990019
MAGIC MOMENTS
1982 Lorimar Pictures announces a feature-film spin-off from the TV show Dallas. It is finally to go into production this autumn.
1985 After the screening of Vivement Truffaut, a documentary on the gifted French director, who had died months earlier, aged 52, actors who worked with him - Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Jeanne Moreau et al - come on stage one by one, ending with Truffaut's partner, Fanny Ardant. I still tingle to recall joining the tearful audience for a sustained standing ovation.
1990 Two dozen aircraft strafe the Cannes beach each lunchtime, flying in formation with banners for Superman V. "It will be the best, the most spectacular, the most exciting in the series," we are promised. The film is never made.
1990 Returning home, I find myself next to David Lynch and Isabella Rossellini on a flight to Paris. Lynch's only hand baggage is the Palme d'Or he won the night before, for Wild at Heart. After I get to hold the Palme d'Or, Lynch gives me an exclusive in-flight interview.
1991 A petulant Lars von Trier expresses his disgust at receiving only a minor prize for Europa by kicking his scroll off the stage and sarcastically thanking "the midget" - Roman Polanski - "and his jury".
1992 Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me gets the loudest booing I've heard at any Cannes press screening. Far and Away is the closing film. I ask Tom Cruise about his Irish accent in the movie. "I found learning it very exciting, though this is not a movie about accents," he replies. How true. When a Russian asks if he and his co-star Nicole Kidman would like to play Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev in a film, Kidman can't suppress her laughter as she says: "That would take quite a stretch of the imagination."
1993 In Cannes to plug his next action movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger walks up the red carpet before the premiere of Mike Leigh's Naked. The cameras flash incessantly, leaving Leigh and his cast of relative unknowns stranded at the foot of the steps on their big night. Pretending to enter the cinema, Arnie brazenly leaves through the back door for dinner.
1994 An electrifying moment when Bruce Willis gives a press conference for Color of Night. The questions are consistently bland until a US journalist has the temerity to ask: "Don't you feel guilty about taking money for making shit like that?"
1996 Virginia Bottomley, the UK culture minister, attends a wild beach party for Trainspotting. Stephen Fry devises a wicked anagram of her name: I'm an evil Tory bigot. A few years earlier, another UK culture minister was opening the British pavilion when a journalist asked if he would be meeting Jeanne Moreau, president of that year's jury. "Yes, I look forward to meeting him."
1997 The Spice Girls come to Cannes to announce Spiceworld: The Movie. "The film is a celebration of London in the 1990s, of our inner and outer struggles," gushes Geri Halliwell. Critics say rather different things about it.
1998 Accepting the best-director award for The General, John Boorman says: "I have lived in Ireland for many years. This week the Irish nation voted for peace, and we are all very thrilled about that."
2000 Lars von Trier's risible Dancer in the Dark reduces half the press to tears while the rest of us cry with laughter. Tapping into its subplot of a production of The Sound of Music, my colleague Arminta Wallace writes an inspired headline for my report: "How do you solve a problem like von Trier?"