A FISTFUL OF ADVICE
Clint Eastwood makes everyone’s day at the Cannes Film Festival, offering tips on how to succeed in life and in the movies.
CANNES, FRANCE— Clint Eastwood made everybody’s day at the Cannes Film Festival this past weekend, first by presenting a 25th-anniversary screening of his Oscar-winning anti-Western Unforgiven and then by giving a master class on cinema, both to packed houses.
The actor/director was mobbed wherever he roamed at the festival, an energetic presence in a black leather jacket who could fool anybody that he’s turning 87 later this month.
Eastwood is a Cannes regular, having premiered six films here — Pale Rider (1985), Bird (1988), White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), Absolute Power (1997), Mystic River (2003) and Changeling (2008), with the last of those earning him a Special Jury Prize.
He’s not yet won the Palme d’Or — he has no hard feelings about that — but he was president of the Palme jury in 1994, the year Quentin Tarantino won for Pulp Fiction.
“I love France and I love the French people,” Eastwood told Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who conducted the master class in the form of an onstage interview in the capacious yet comfortable Bunuel Theatre in the Palais des Festivals.
Eastwood feels so at home in France, in fact, he’s planning to make his next movie about a dramatic victory in the country’s ongoing battle against terrorism: the thwarted August 2015 terror attack aboard a high-speed train bound for Paris, in which a gunman carrying an assault rifle and other weapons was subdued by passengers, two of them off-duty members of the U.S. armed forces.
“I thought that was an interesting situation in these strange times that we live in now,” Eastwood said.
He’ll only direct the film, since he hung up his acting spurs following his 2012 baseball drama Trouble With the Curve after a career of unforgettable performances that include vigilante cop Dirty Harry and western anti-hero The Man With No Name. Does he miss acting? “Once in a while, but not that often. I’ll visit it again someday.”
Eastwood had a lot to say about his six-decade movie and TV career, which started in 1955 with an uncredited role in Revenge of the Creature but hit the big time when he became a regular on the hit TV cowboy series Rawhide in 1959.
He also had a lot of thoughts about just making of go of this thing called life.
In no particular order, let’s list the best of them here:
Clint Eastwood’s 10 Tips on How to Succeed in Movies and in Life: 1. “I’d rather be lucky than good.” 2. “The more you work, the better it’s going to be.”
3. “Put your nose to the grindstone and if things don’t work out, keep going.”
4. “Sometimes your brain can be very dense, but your gut is really strong. Your instincts are much better sometimes than your intellect.”
5. “Today, we’re killing ourselves with political correctness. We’ve really lost our sense of humour.”
6. (On cinema): “Film is an emotional art form. It’s not an intellectual art form at all.”
7. (On directing): “If it’s material that’s interesting, it’s never hard. It’s great fun.”
8. (On acting): “If you don’t enjoy it, then do something else.”
9. (On overthinking): “If you start intellectualizing, or pseudo-intellectualizing, you can get yourself in a real box. You could just be putting out a dull thing.”
10. (On not winning at Cannes): “If you take it so seriously, then you’re taking yourself seriously and that’s the most dangerous thing in the world.”
Raves for Haneke and Lanthimos Followers of the provocative and sometimes-perverse films of Austria’s Michael Haneke and Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos know better than to take too literally the titles of their movies. Much layered meaning is packed into them.
Such is the case with Haneke’s Happy End and Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, both of which are premiering to critical raves as the 2017 Cannes Film Festival reaches the halfway mark.
Happy End finds Haneke revisiting themes of social inequality, quality of life (and the ending of it), sexual obsessions and modern miscommunication that he’s examined in other films. But here his surgical scalpel is sharper than ever.
He assembles a great cast — reuniting with Amour’s Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert, along with Mathieu Kassovitz, Franz Rogowski, Toby Jones, Fantine Harduin and young discovery Laura Verlinden — for a story set in Calais that indirectly addresses the European refugee crisis, but mainly cuts deep into the soft underbelly of the bourgeoisie.
The family of wealthy retired construction tycoon Georges Laurent (Trintignant) finds itself beset with indignities of all sorts: a drug overdose, a savage beating, kinky sexual infidelity, a wandering patriarch with dementia and a job site wall collapse that may lead to a ruinous legal settlement. Keeping an eye on all this, often via Snapchat and other social media, is the family’s sullen preteen daughter Ève (Harduin), whose intentions seem alarmingly sinister. The film keeps us riveted to the screen, parsing every carefully lensed deed and misdeed, and it makes the viewer complicit in extreme behaviour. Happy End could easily make Haneke a historic threetime Palme d’Or winner at festival’s end on May 28, following previous wins for The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour ( 2012).
This is also a good year for Lanthimos, who was last in the Palme competition in 2015 with The Lobster, a dystopian social satire.
The writer/director reunites with The Lobster star Colin Farrell for The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a supernatural horror thriller that comes on at first like the blandest of TV hospital dramas. Farrell plays Steven Murphy, a successful Cincinnati heart surgeon who has a big house, a beautiful wife (Nicole Kidman), adorable children Bob (Sunny Suljic) and Kim (Raffey Cassidy), plus money to burn on toys like ridiculously expensive timepieces.
Steven also has a strangely close friendship with a serious teen named Martin (Barry Keoghan, soon to be in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk). Then there’s that bizarre bedroom trick that Steve and the missus do, which they call “general anesthetic.” The real tip-off for this film’s rising dread, though, is the spooky score and the news that the film was inspired by Greek tragedy. I’ll say no more about it for the moment, other than to note that it kept a press audience enthralled at its 8:30 a.m. Monday morning screening, and that young Irish actor Keoghan is a rising star to watch. Follow Peter Howell on Twitter and Instagram @peterhowellfilm.