Live from Cannes!

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0:35Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to speed on what's going on in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson with Ryan Lattanzio in our condo just off the Rue d 'Antibes in Cannes. We can roll out of bed to market screenings at the Olympia or the projections at the Palais.

0:54Ryan Lattanzio:Let's recap what's happened at the festival so far. On Monday, Terry Frameau gave a press conference expressing hope that the studios are going to come back to the festival one day. He also is supportive of Wim Wenders and the Berlinale, who, as you may remember, got very much stuck in political controversy back in February. We've seen Trisha Tuttle, the artistic director around the festival. She survived and is here at Cannes. And Tuesday at the jury press conference, President Park Chan-wook, Demi Moore, Paul Lavery, these are members of the jury, defended political movies and didn't get in trouble for speaking out.

1:29Lavery supported Cannes poster girl Susan Sarandon, who he says has been blacklisted, along with Mark Ruffalo, for their leftist views. They got applause. So there seems to be a sort of shift in the zeitgeist. And Frimo said that at the party, at the gala, that, you know, politics is now the theme of all these festivals.

1:54Ryan Lattanzio:Well, the person who's in a lot of hot water online, I would say, is Demi Moore for saying basically that AI is here and we need to embrace it. I think that a lot of that has to do with it's a generational thing. She's really reiterating what Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock already said. And I feel like the way they see it is that they've already lived through worse things and they've witnessed a lot of change. They were witnessing the advent of the Internet. So to them, it's not maybe it's as threatening. But people are very upset about what she said. And this is just not a topic where there's any room for nuance.

2:26All right. I listened to what she said. She was making a big statement about art and about humanity and about the ability to create art. And she went on to say at a certain point, I don't think the people are quoting this, if there was something we could do to control AI, to protect people from AI. She wasn't sure what it was, but she believed that maybe we weren't doing enough. And that nuance has not been expressed.

2:56Ryan Lattanzio:No, I mean, that part of what she said has not been quoted anywhere. And it's sort of like the Timothee Chalamet ballet thing, where when you watch the full clip, you understand that what was interpreted is not exactly what was being said. But it's too late now. But also, Ryan, when you read about, you know, online chatter, who is it? Who are we talking about who's upset with her? anyone that matters, anyone that we care about? I guess the question is, is it going to have some kind of long-term impact on her? Because in the room from someone like me, it felt like she handled it very deftly with a certain degree of professional control.

3:35Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I mean, these people that are commenting, they were not in the room, so they obviously didn't get the break.

3:44Basically, we're basically getting into some screenings That's what we got to do here. I went to the opening night movie. You got to skip it. Thank God for you. It was just a sort of a forgettable de Verde small from France called the electric kiss. A carnival movie that made Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley look like a hustler. But they played it played well for the French. And actually, Demi Moore said, thank God for a light movie. You know, she was grateful. She's going to sit through a lot of serious shit this week.

4:18Ryan Lattanzio:It may be the only light movie. You know, the French often get that slot because they need to open the movie on the same day in France. That's the deal. Wide. And they also need to pay for the opening night party. So it often ends up being the French commercial movie. So this movie is never going to be distributed in the U.S. It's not going to cross the Atlantic, no. So the gala dinner was fun. I wish you could have gone. They only gave us one ticket. And the Demi Moore and Stellan Sarzard were singing each other's praises. Clockwork Chief Christian Parks, that's the new Warner Brothers indie libel.

4:57He was touting his Ken classics entry, The Devils, from bad boy Ken Russell. I told him I will never see that movie again because it freaked me out so much when I first saw it.

5:09Ryan Lattanzio:This version apparently has restored even more graphic material that you maybe maybe you saw that in the version you did. I did. I probably did. I'm going to be seeing that tonight. Of course. I'm curious to see how I've always been a big defender of Ken Russell as a very, very effective director. That's the thing. He's such a good director that he can he's capable of completely freaking you out. Yeah, Clockwork's going to be taking this movie out into theaters in the fall, so I'm really curious to see how it resonates with the repertory audience. I bet it does well, because it's going to blow the extreme violence that people seem to embrace these days.

5:53And they're going to actually probably dig into the Warner Archive even more, which I think is smart. That's a good play for them.

6:01Ryan Lattanzio:A movie that I saw last night that I don't know if that one's going to be for you, Anne, or not, is Jane Schoenbrand's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which opened Uncertain Regard. And this stars Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbender in her first feature film role, now that Hacks is coming to an end on HBO Max. Actually, earlier in the day at American Pavilion, which IndieWire is running this year, I did a pretty lively Q &A with the three of them. I hadn't seen the movie at that point, so that was interesting from a journalistic perspective. This is the new film from the director of I Saw the TV Glow, and we've talked about this a few times on the podcast.

6:37Ryan Lattanzio:And it's a lesbian kind of erotic romance between these two actors. It's also an homage to 1980s slasher movies. And Jane Schoenbrunn is saying that they really see this as their most commercial movie, but I actually think it's one of their most cerebral and at times even impenetrable works. Oh, that's what you're saying. Yeah, it's very enjoyable, but it's very heady and multilayered, and there are parts of it that almost feel like an academic exercise that is about... Well, it's supposedly satirizing horror films like Carpenter's Mouth of Madness. Yeah, and the Fright of the 13th movies, and then there's like a famously transphobic, but now regarded as being very progressive horror movie from the 80s called Sleepaway Camp.

7:20Ryan Lattanzio:This movie, Cam Miasma, is about a filmmaker who's tasked with rebooting a kind of problematic slasher movie franchise. And she wants the original final girl who's played by Gillian Anderson to star in it. But they end up going into a kind of psychosexual frenzy. You're not selling me, Ryan. Yeah, I had about two hours to write this review before the between the press screening and the premiere. And I did pull it off, but I don't I feel like I barely scratched the surface of this movie that I think is going to play best to lesbian horror movie fans. That's a narrow niche. Yeah. I had I talked to to at least someone who fits the lesbian side of that mold and they they didn't go for it.

8:07But you need to be into horror. That's what it sounds like.

8:11Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. And you need to be somewhat horror literate. seemed like it played really well at the Debussy. I went to the after party and obviously the cast and the filmmakers were there and everyone seemed to really be into it. I think it plays really well for a crowd. It's just a matter of getting that crowd to see the movie. So you and I have both been seeing a lot of screenings, but that doesn't mean that we can talk about everything that we've seen. This morning, the press saw Pavel Polakowski's Fatherland, which is another beautiful black and white period. The extraordinary Sandra Fuller is so good in it that I think she might win Best Actress here.

8:54Wow, really? I do feel that way.

8:56Ryan Lattanzio:I actually said that of all of her movies this year, I know you haven't seen Rose yet, which she won the Berlin Lakers for. Between that and Project Hail Mary, I felt like this maybe wouldn't necessarily be the one that she's remembered for compared to those two roles. But that's interesting. No, no. I thought she was extraordinary in it. That said, this is a very cerebral, very literary, very heady, serious examination of what Germany was going through in the post-war period. And August Diehl gives a remarkable performance in basically one scene at the very beginning of the movie, a long single take that I think is one of the most masterful things I've ever seen.

9:40Ryan Lattanzio:Wow. Yeah, that's he's playing. So the movie is about Tomas Mann and Sandra Hewler is playing. But that isn't revealed right away. That's right. That's right. I mean, it's revealed if you knew what you were going to see, I suppose. I didn't. No. And it is coy about revealing what it's about. And I think sometimes maybe impenetrable is the wrong word. But what's different about this movie is that Pavel Povolkowski, he's always inventing characters in movies like Ida and Cold War. But here he's working with historical figures for the first time. So there's kind of a lot of context that you might need to digest.

10:12Ryan Lattanzio:But I think it's still appreciable on its own terms as a father-daughter story. It's a great movie. It's a great movie. It's just that it's going to play to a very narrow art house audience. I would say it has less accessible. It's less accessible than his previous films. Totally. But stylistically, it's the same thing. It's almost like these movies are kind of trilogy. And I don't know if he thinks of it in those terms. I look forward to speaking with him. I'm going to talk to him, and I'm very excited about that because he's a master filmmaker. I was very moved by the movie. I was unexpectedly moved by the ending.

10:51Ryan Lattanzio:Well, the ending is where the, you know, it's pretty stingy on emotion throughout the movie. And the ending, finally, it opens up to that. Well, there are a few really great, well-placed, angry men where Sandra Hiller slaps her, a man who turns out to be her ex-husband. And turns out to be a Nazi. Amazing. I'm fine. Yeah. And she has she has a kind of lesbian vibe going on with that. You felt strongly about that. Well, there was a little flirtation there. There definitely was. I mean, this is a very queer family like Klaus Mann. He is he was openly gay, also openly gay communist. And Tomas Mann is the author of Death in Venice.

11:28Ryan Lattanzio:I mean, he faced a lot of accusations of homosexuality. So historically, he is regarded as potentially being gay. So the movie isn't dealing with that. But this is actually it's interesting. This is a very gay festival. Mubi win the Palme d 'Or. Let somebody else win the Palme d 'Or. Yeah, Mubi has Fatherland and also Minotaur, the Andres for Gintzev one that we're going to see next week that we're both super excited about. Yeah, exactly. That's where we are at the moment. Today was fun because I hosted a conversation with Mexican star Diego Luna at the American Cavillian where he talked about Ashes, his fourth film.

12:06as a director. We'll be posting that on IndieWire, and you can look at that conversation.

12:12Ryan Lattanzio:This morning, this is what I was up to, and I guess I can talk about this by the time this podcast is out. I went to the press screening of the Oscar for Hottie movie Parallel Tales, which he shot in Paris. He's not shooting movies in Iran anymore. This is with Isabel Huppert. And he did shoot that other movie, The Past, that was in French. And I liked The Past a lot. The Past is very good. And Berenice Bejo won Best Actress that year here. This movie is not as successful. And what it turns out is that the movie is it's a loose adaptation of some Christoph Kozlowski films. But. Decalogue. Yeah, there's the Decalogue.

12:46Ryan Lattanzio:But then there's a very clear reference to three colors blue in it. Also the film A Shackle.

13:03Thank you.

13:33Thank you.

14:03Ryan Lattanzio:what's interesting is that the movie also deals in plagiarism. Well, that's been an issue for him. Yep. So, but, you know, and allegedly he was plagiarizing his students. And, you know, with this being the first movie after all of that, you see maybe there may have been some truth to that. I don't know. You're going to see for yourself, but there's a lot of dead air. He denied it. Yeah. He denied it. There's a lot of dead air in this thing, and I think it's going to be a tough sell for people. What else have you seen that we'll be talking about later? I mean, there's things that I've signed embargoes for that I don't think I can even say what they were.

14:37So coming up next week, we're going to be doing Screen Talk Live at the American Pavilion. And it's just going to be me and Ryan talk. It's just us. No, no go.

14:50Ryan Lattanzio:I'm looking forward to it. Me too. So one of the other films we saw was The Meltdown, which is a Chilean movie. and I really liked it. I thought it was terrific. It's a bit of a coming-of-age story. It reminded me a little bit of Josephine. It's about this young girl, she's 10 years old, who gets sort of besotted with an older girl who's about 14, who's an incredible skier. They're in a resort in the winter, in the mountains. And the girl disappears. And the 10-year-old has seen a number of things. that she knows probably are relevant to the disappearance. And she becomes close with the girl's mother.

15:37There's a whole lot of stuff going on there that is really interesting. And it's about a girl learning about the corruption of the world.

15:46Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, and the stains of the Pinochet dictatorship and so forth. The director is Manuela Martelli. She previously directed a film called Chile 76, which I actually didn't see. She's in uncertain regard with this film this year. It also reminded me of Picnic at Hanging Rock. It has that kind of vibe. Yeah, that dreamy kind of movie vibe. Yeah, yeah. Hanging around a disappearing girl and also dealing with the sexual awakening in a young, in this girl who goes missing. That maybe her instructor might have something to do with. Just him. No, it seems to be a conspiracy. Okay, so that's a good one to look forward to.

16:26I wish I could talk about Clarissa, which has already been picked up by Neil.

16:30Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I'm seeing that on Saturday. The other one I saw that's in the competition is Nagi Notes, directed by Koji Fukada. And this is one of those quietly lovely movies that only the Japanese can pull off. It's sort of as tranquil and emotionally cool as a Zen garden. And it's about a sculptor who's reunited with her estranged sister-in-law in a remote Japanese town. this is one of a few Japanese films in the competition because we also have rice Uki Hamaguchi is all of a sudden coming up this week please I mean there's Sudan which is from Hamaguchi Ryosuke there's the other one hope which neon has from nah home chick so that's Korean there's others in other sections of the idea as sheep in the box yeah yeah i'm very excited about hope and i really have no idea what to think nope i don't know anything about that one but i did see his previous film the wailing which is a very creepy thriller and you know he's definitely a filmmaker that's carving out a space that's in the bong jun ho vein absolutely and there the other thing that that's worth noting a lot around laissa do the french actress um and the reason for that is that she's in two movies, Arthur Harari, like the new, and Gentle Monster from Marie Kreutzer.

17:54Ryan Lattanzio:I've seen both of these movies. I didn't sign any paperwork that says I can't acknowledge that I saw them, and I will say she is amazing in both of them. I mean, she is the biggest French star that is in any of these films in the competition, I would say. And she definitely has a shot at winning Best Actress 2. She has a Cannes Award from sharing the Palma d 'Or for Blue is the Warmest Color, you know which we know she feels about that film now uh i just think she is one of the best actors working and these two very different movies are just they're going to play for kind of very different audiences but she's fantastic in both of them i can't wait i'm i'm set to see both of them i'm set to see the christian manju of course uh romanian but working in a different uh language too this time fjord yeah norwegian and some romanian but mostly norwegian so i'm looking forward to that.

18:44Is that the one with Renata Ronsvi?

18:46Ryan Lattanzio:That's Renata and Sebastian Stan, who is unrecognizable as usual. Yeah, he's bald. He shaved his head. I don't think it's a bald cap. He actually shaved his head for this one. He's amazing. He's just amazing. What about the man I love, Iris Sacks? I cannot say anything. Well, these are the things that we'll come back to you on next week.

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