Regrets, our Jamie Graham’s had a few...
Editor-at-Large JAMIE GRAHAM lifts the lid on film journalism. THIS MONTH THE ONES WHO GOT AWAY.
Cannes Film Festival, 2008. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull has played out of competition the previous day, and this afternoon, in the prestigious Carlton Hotel on the Croisette, a star-studded meet-and-greet has been arranged for a roomful of journalists.
There are probably 100 of the world’s press gathered, sorted into groups of five or six at regular intervals around the room. The idea is that Steven Spielberg and his stars will be brought in one by one and guided from group to group to shake hands and have a quick chat. Lovely. So in comes Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, Cate Blanchett; the system works like a dream. Then Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf arrive together. They look pissed off and walk straight through the room and out onto the balcony, closing the doors behind them. No dice. Oh well, Spielberg has been saved for last, and the room buzzes with excitement.
Here he is! Wearing a trademark baseball cap! But 90 per cent of the press forget they’re professional journalists and surge forward like fanboys. He’s mobbed. I stand my ground, determined to be respectful, and now and again I catch a glimpse of his baseball cap. And then he is gone. To this day I’ve never met the director who shaped my dreams as a kid, as a teen, as an adult.
NO CIGAR
Every film journalist has people they’d especially like to meet. And every film journalist has ‘the ones who got away’. In my 24 years on the job, I’ve been fortunate enough to interview many idols and icons, from Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep to Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Soderbergh. I’ve even met Danny Dyer, three times. But I also have the gigs that were not to be, and they haunt me to this day.
I lost a coin flip with a colleague to interview Leonardo DiCaprio. I was going on set of Peter Jackson’s King Kong in New Zealand only for it to clash with the only week’s holiday I had booked that year. Same for a set visit to Atlanta for Doctor Sleep, meaning I lost the chance to step into the Overlook Hotel that had so haunted my entire life. And Ingmar Bergman, my all-time favourite film director, agreed to do one UK interview for the release of a 31-disc DVD boxset in 2006; I was flying to the island of Faro, where he’d filmed so many of his masterpieces, to meet the great man himself... and then he changed his mind and cancelled the week before.
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE
These are, naturally, absolute first-world problems, and my career has been far too blessed to curse my luck. But we all have our heroes and the people whose work means everything to us, and such close calls can’t help but rankle. So while I’ve walked the Fox studio lot with James Cameron and asked Robert De Niro when he last called someone a “fockin’ mook” and shared a Japanese dinner with Dario Argento, I will never quite get over the fact that I was an hour away from interviewing my favourite working filmmaker in his home when it fell apart.
The writer/director in question was none other than Paul Thomas Anderson, whose There Will Be Blood had been chosen as TF’s Film of the Decade. We’d arranged an interview to coincide with the days I was in LA on a film junket, and after a final confirmation that morning, I was getting into a cab to take a ride to PTA’s house in the San Fernando Valley where he shot Boogie Nights and Magnolia when he sent me an email postponing our chat because of a family emergency. Given
I was leaving LA the next day, the access-all-areas interview became a chat on the phone.
First-world problem? Certainly. But kinda devastating nonetheless.
Jamie will return next issue… For more misadventures, follow: @jamie_graham9 on Twitter.
‘NOW AND AGAIN I CATCH A GLIMPSE OF HIS BASEBALL CAP. AND THEN SPIELBERG IS GONE’