Lumiere Festival: Thierry Fremaux on the Festival as a ‘Feast,’ Cinema influencing life
Could Lyon’s Lumiere Festival - an event dedicated near entirely to classic movies - be shaping up, outside animation, as France’s second biggest film festival? Last year, it ratcheted up 150,000 admissions. In 2016, it has a guest list most festivals would die for: Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Winding Refn, Park Chan-wook, Gaspar Noe, Walter Hill, Jerry Schatzberg and the French film greats led by Catherine Deneuve, Costa Gavras and Jean-Paul Jeunet and, in industry terms, Nicolas and Jerome Seydoux, heads of Gaumont and Pathe respectively. Not forgetting the Institute Lumiere’s Bertrand Tavernier and Thierry Fremaux which run and host the affair. “Host” may be an appropriate word. Fremaux insists the festival should be a ‘feast,’ a fiesta.
The Lumiere Festival unspools as several hundred live shows, where directors, actors, critics and quite often Bertrand Tavernier - who sometimes seems to remember more about films than the people who made them - talk about films they feel passionate about, often not their own. Here, on the eve of the 8th Lumiere Festival, Fremaux explains the dynamics and attraction of that system, also talks with passion about his guests and his cornerstone belief in film as a communal experience - the Lumieres’ essential invention - and how cinema can influence lives:
Great retrospective
Film festivals editions are like vintages. What could or is special about 2016’s Lumiere Festival? Thierry Fremaux: What’s special? It’s a woman’s edition this year, not only because of Catherine Deneuve’s Lumiere Award, but also the Dorothy Arzner tribute and the great retrospective called Hollywood, the City of Women, using the Fellini title. It’s really about all these actresses of the 1930s, ‘40, and ‘50s. Because, apart from Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe, many of these women are not so well-known now, so we wanted to go back to them. It’s a wonderful retrospective with a lot of great movies.
Then we have many restored prints. We have lots of good new things, the new print of Jerry Schatzberg’s “The Panic in Needle Park,” the new print of “Manhattan” in digital. And we’re delighted to have Park Chan-wook. Asian cinema is more and more part of the cinephilia for young movie buffs today, which was not the case 30 years ago except for Japanese cinema. Now you have Chinese and Korean cinema, Taiwan cinema.
It’s very important. But I’d say the festival is special in itself because of the disaster of the world. It is more and more important to have these kinds of cultural events. We want this event to be a very popular and happy one, giving memory of the past and relaying it to the future. And being all together: Artists, journalists, people, and art and film. Maybe what is special in a way is that more and more we want to make the festival like a feast, something which is packed by emotion, tenderness, respect and admiration.
Actors and actresses
Over the last three months, lots of people told us that the festival had become more important to them. Of course, we are in Lyon. There are hundreds and thousands of festivals in the world. Everywhere they are very important. I am struck by the number of stars, actors, directors who are coming to present films or give master classes. Are they presenting more films than usual? Yes and no. More and more after seven years, artists come to Lyon, present films like normal people. But they are not normal, they are artists. That’s why their words about art and film are so important. Of course a lot of movie directors, like Martin Scorsese last year, are movie buffs. JeanPierre Jeunet, example, has a large admiration for Marcel Carne. There are also actors and actresses, though not known for it, but who are movie buffs: Vincent Lindon, as you say, is a great movie buff. It’s such a gift to have someone introducing the film which is directed or performed by someone else.
It is a good sign of how devoted people of cinema are to cinema. This festival is not about the past, it’s about how the past is important for the present and future. The last thing is the audience. We will have 150,000 people in one week, paying tickets, going back to being in a theater together. What the Lumieres invented 121 years, going to see a movie in a cinema theater, is still going strong. Watching a film on a big screen in front of 5,000 people on the Festival’s opening night: That is still an unforgettable experience. Your attendance hit 150,000 last year, right?
Yes, it’s a sign of people still loving cinema, that they are still intelligent and full of culture and curiosity. The master classes are for the general public as well? Yes, all are for the public. It’s a privileged moment to spend an hour or two with a movie star. Also to listen. I want to know what Walter Hill has to say. It will be very interesting. Or Catherine Deneuve, for example. She is not at all out of it. She’s very grounded, involved in daily life, she talks about flowers, antique furniture. After seven years, you also have repeat collaborations and presences. Quentin Tarantino is programming a section which is typically eclectic where you have “Hollywood Vixens” and “Love Story.”
Increasingly divided
Yes. You look at his list and you want to know why he picked this film or that. And you have another highlight, Nicolas Winding Refn, presenting his second, “lost” film, “Bleeder,” which I think was only distributed in parts of Scandinavia, and one other country. It’s a way to have him back. It will be good he was in competition again in Cannes. But he’ll come to Lyon not as the guy who was in competition but as the young guy who directed this very early film. You also have another filmmaker who obviously has a long part of his career ahead of him who is Gasper Noe.
Yes, we are not a festival of history, we are about cinema. Gaspar is a cult director but, as Jean-Luc Godard used to say about his own movies, his films are not seen by a lot of people. Gaston is a cult director for a lot of other directors. His films are not very commercially successful, but more and more time is proving him right. We are going to talk about that with him. Gaspar works like a painter. — Reuters