How ‘penniless’ filmmakers made it to Cannes

ACTORS AND DIRECTORS who made their names at Cannes film festival were asked to recount their highs and lows at the star-studded event. Here’s what they said.

ROMAN POLANSKI

He went to Cannes in the late 1950s as a film student on what was his first trip to the West following Nikita Khrushchev’s landmark speech denouncing Joseph Stalin. “I went to Paris and promised myself I would visit Cannes Festival.”

On the way, he missed the bus to the airport. “There was an older gentleman with a lot of white hair who was with a young woman and he suggested we share a taxi.”

It turned out to be French filmmaker Abel Gance and Argentinean-born writer Nelly Kaplan: “I was naturally awestruck. Being a film student, I knew the story (of their work together) very well. We shared the fare,” he recalls.

“He was probably as broke as me.”

GUILLERMO DEL TORO

His first and best memory of Cannes was in 1993 when he shared a two-bedroom apartment with six other people.

“We arrived without a cent and we lived without a cent,” he says, recalling they lived on cheap kebabs.

But it was that week he went on to win the Mercedes-Benz Award for Cronos.

“Winning the prize changed my life. Without it, I don’t know where I would be.”

“For me, the prize was a lifeline at a difficult time when I owed $250,000 for the film which I didn’t know how I’d pay.”