Photo: Richard Blanshard
What do you get when you cross a leading trade editor, a very well-connected former festival director/critic, arguably Cannes’ top snapper over the years and a UK producer with an archive of Croisette coverage going back over a quarter century? Answer: potentially the most definitive documentary history of the Cannes Film Festival, currently in production ahead of delivery ahead of next year’s 75th edition.
You would have thought that such an enterprise had been undertaken before, a definitive history of the world’s leading festival (and market) since its launch in 1947. Well if it has, then Chris Pickard hasn’t come across it, and he should know, having been for many years editor-in-chief of the glorious, at times notorious, Moving Pictures International, whose festival closing parties back in the 1990s were the stuff of legend.
Pickard is partnering on the project with Mark Adams, former Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, as well as critic for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Moving Pictures (of course), Screen International and, yep, Business Doc Europe. Joining them is award-winning photographer, producer, director and DOP Richard Blanshard. The fab four is completed by Colin Burrows, independent producer, publicity consultant and CEO of the Special Treats Production Company, described as Europe’s leading production house for audio-visual coverage of the film industry.
Together they are making Cannes UNCUT…Movies, Moguls and Money: Behind the Curtain at the Cannes Film Festival, a feature doc that promises to “delve behind the scenes of the gloriously glamorous and glitzy event that has come to represent the best in cinema and the business of showbusiness.”
“This is the documentary that dares to detail all the glamour, red carpets, craziness, deals, parties, movies, and personalities that saw the business of show business implant itself at the Cannes Film Festival. It offers an exciting high-adrenaline, roller-coaster experience of what has played out over the years,” the project’s publicity further underlines.
Pickard argues that folks within the film trades have always been best positioned to chart the evolution of the festival over the years, given how their gaze is always cast so wide during each yearly event. “You’d walk into a sales company’s office and they would have no interest or no knowledge of what film is playing in competition that night. Then you’d have a bunch of cinephiles that didn’t even realize there was a market going on,” says Pickard. “It’s really funny how we are now used to bubbles and speaking about bubbles, but you look back and you realize in Cannes there were always lots of different bubbles.”
Hopefully there will be bubbles of another kind at Cannes 2021 as Pickard and Adams conduct their myriad interviews with the great and the good of the international film scene, stars and top industry alike, as well as the hotel staff and restaurant managers who will offer up their own take on Cannes, its mystique and its excesses.
Pickard explains how duties will be divided among the quartet. “Colin, I would say, is the lead producer and Richard is the director because he has the director’s eye and the photographic art,” he says. “Mark and myself will be let loose interviewing at Cannes this week and then afterwards, and knowing our background and the knowledge we’ve got of Cannes, we hope to tell the full story and do it justice.”
“There’ll be great storytellers and [the film] will stand by the strength of those people, their memories and their tales,” Pickard adds of some his and Adams’ upcoming interviews. “A lot of the focus will be from the 1980s onwards…when it was all Cannon [the Golan-Globus owned production/distribution/sales concern which seemed to dominate the Croisette].” Then there was the 1990s era of the now disgraced Harvey Weinstein, he continues. “Then a company like Wild Bunch comes along and had so many films in competition and in the market. So it’s looking at those, but not forgetting old friends like Troma (responsible for classics such as The Toxic Avenger) who brought so much colour to the whole thing.”
Pickard tells of some of the footage he has been recently viewing and weighing up for inclusion in the film. “They [Special Treats] have a huge archive of footage from over the years, including all the big celebrity parties, all the major Hollywood films. I was looking at [footage of] the Star Wars parties. I was looking at another great bit of footage, which was Tom Hanks on his first visit to Cannes. And you can see that he’s just blown away by the whole experience.”
The film will also chart how working practices have evolved over the years, Pickard further notes. “It was lovely to discover that in the early days of the festival, when Variety first went to cover it, their critics were allowed to post their reviews back to New York. They actually went to the post office and posted them. Bring us up to date, and the festivals tell people you can’t text or tweet from the middle of a screening to do your review!…We remember the years of Cannes before mobile phones… So it’s going to reflect all of that. It’s going to be a real overview of how the world has changed, as well as Cannes itself.”
