Cannes Uncut, the new feature documentary about the “glorious excesses, triumphs and failures” of the world’s most famous movie bazaar, has been screening in the market this week prior to its official world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival next month. Autlook is handling world sales.
The new film covers everything from the splendour of Cannes red carpet premieres to the bathos of the Palm Dog awards, given to the best canine performer. It includes interviews with festival head Thierry Frémaux; Cannes regulars Tilda Swinton, Juliette Binoche and Léa Seydoux and many directors, among them Christine Vachon, Lynne Ramsay, Ken Loach and Wim Wenders.
However when producers Chris Pickard and Mark Adams first conceived the project, the focus was far narrower. Both are top film journalists themselves (Adams is one of the reviewers at Business Doc Europe). They had originally planned to concentrate on the trade press in Cannes: the daily battle at the festival between rival publications like Screen International, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and, back in the day, Moving Pictures International.
“We thought that might be a nice little doc to do,” Pickard says. They knew that friend Richard Blanshard was the “go to photographer” for Cannes. Blanshard, who has ended up directing the documentary alongside editor Roger Penny, had been a stills photographer for PR company DDA. He had photographed everybody and everything that happened on the Cannes Croisette.
Pickard and Adams had a coffee with Blanshard. “Great idea,” the photographer responded to the idea of the doc and put them in touch with Colin Burrows at Special Treats. It transpired that while Blanchard had been taking still images of the festival, Burrows had been shooting video footage of all the heroes and knaves who converge in the Riviera every May.
“We went round to see Colin and he embraced it [the documentary] immediately,” says Pickard.
The Special Treats production company, now owned by Once Upon a Time (OUAT) helped finance the doc and brought in extra backing.
“We started to put the archive together with what they had. Mark and I started to put the whole history together,” Pickard recalls. By now, they knew the film was going to be far more ambitious in scope. It would go “way beyond” the story of the Cannes trade press, telling the entire story of how the festival was launched in 1939, abandoned because of Hitler and then re-established after the Second World War.
“What always surprises people is that there is no documentary on the history of Cannes. Everybody thinks they’ve seen one but it is of a given year,” Pickard points out how Cannes Uncut is filling a big gap in the market.
Much of the filming was done during the pandemic Cannes in 2021 and at the 75th anniversary edition in 2022. The filmmakers quickly realised that everybody who has been to Cannes has their own story about the festival.
Alongside the interviews, there is footage of red carpets, parties, photo-calls, the constant queues and the famous Croisette crawl, when foot traffic on the famous Cannes seafront thoroughfare slows down to less than a snail’s pace because of the crowds, the barriers and the police.
Cannes boss Frémaux gave the filmmakers a lengthy interview in Paris. According to Adams, “he is very much the spine of the film. He is really smart, erudite and thoughtful. He talks about the history of the festival, the reality of streaming, the future of cinema, red carpets and all those things.”
One interviewee tells the filmmakers that the first time she encountered the Cannes market, it struck her that the attendees were selling movies as if they were “nail polish.” At the time, within the festival itself, film is treated as the highest of the arts.
The documentary covers famous Cannes stunts and photo opportunities. Back in the early 1960s, when Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren were presenting Hitch’s The Birds (1963), they released a flock of pigeons into the Riviera sky. Robert Mitchum was in town when he was accosted by a topless starlet. Kirk Douglas is shown brushing Brigitte Bardot’s hair.
The filmmakers cover everything from the festival’s celebration of cinema to the Cannes market’s embrace of commerce. “When home entertainment came in, when VHS suddenly started, that changed the market with everybody flogging stuff down in the market bunker,” Pickard notes. The doc also looks at the dark shadow cast over the festival by the disgraced Miramax mogul, Harvey Weinstein, and at the Cannon years, when Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus began to flood the market with cheesy action pictures.
Cannes Uncut also gives a voice to the paparazzi, asking them how the role of the photographer at the festival has changed over the years. A generation ago, press had easy access to the stars. Nowadays, there are ever more rigid barriers between the media and the “talent.” The challenge for photographers now is, as Pickard puts it, “how to get that special photo which is different.”
Pickard himself first attended Cannes in the mid 1980s. At the time, he was Screen International’s correspondent in Brazil. Mark Adams first set foot at the festival with the trade journal Moving Pictures International in 1990.
Cannes Uncut had its market premiere with Autlook a few days ago. After its Sydney premiere, it will spool out to the world.
