Vanessa Thorpe 

Cannes diary: cows, cuts and how a doctor starred with Deneuve

Andrea Arnold spills some beans on her Big Little Lies difficulties; and how Gabriel Sara ended up acting beside his screen idol
  
  

Andrea Arnold promoting her documentary, Cow, at Cannes.
Andrea Arnold promoting her documentary, Cow, at Cannes. Photograph: Sébastien Nogier/EPA

British director Andrea Arnold has given a glimpse of her bad experience making the second season of the hit US TV drama Big Little Lies, confirming the hard time she had during editing.

“I learned a great deal,” said Arnold, who is in Cannes to promote her new film Cow, a documentary about an English dairy farm which premiered in a new non-competitive strand at the festival. “There were five editors on Big Little Lies and there was a lot of stopping and starting.”

Her work, which was admired by cast members Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern, was later altered by the HBO network to match that of the director of the first season, Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée.

But Arnold, who has won three jury awards for past Cannes competition entries, her debut Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016), revealed to the Observer that she was now working on a project called Bird. “It is not called Bird in the same way that this one is called Cow,” she said. So not an ornithological documentary.

“Cannes is a great place to show a new film, but I am just so exhausted because of all the films I’m seeing,” added Arnold, who is chairing the jury of the Un Certain Regard competition.

Elsewhere in Cannes an air of mystery surrounds Wes Anderson’s film The French Dispatch, which is the big premiere on Monday. It tells the collected stories of a group of newspaper reporters, but journalists at the festival will not be able to quiz any of its starry ensemble cast, including Timothée Chalamet, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Elisabeth Moss and Willem Dafoe, nor will they see special screenings.

Limited access to the production is another suspected symptom of Covid-19’s impact on 2021’s delayed festival. Everyone attending from outside Europe and people with vaccinations not yet approved in France is given a PCR test every other day, glamorously involving spitting into a funnel. About three positive cases are being detected daily so far.

Meanwhile Carlton hotel, usually the centre of celebrity fuss, is this year eerily empty, as the famous building is being refurbished, its corridors walked only by ghosts of bygone stars.

Joanna Hogg, British director of The Souvenir and its now equally acclaimed sequel, The Souvenir: Part II, told the Observer she made a rare exception to her rule of never viewing her films to watch a screening on Thursday evening, sitting alongside stars Tilda Swinton and her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne. “I may never see it again,” she said.

The trio received a standing ovation for the semi-autobiographical film, which pokes mild fun at Britain’s National Film and Television School. Hogg attended in the mid-1980s, before going on to make music videos and TV. No one from the school had contacted her yet, she said, but she was waiting with interest.

As a boy Dr Gabriel Sara, now a leading figure at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, was entranced by Catherine Deneuve’s performance in the classic French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “I never forgot it. I had always loved her and her films.” Now the Observer has learned that, after an extraordinary turn of events, the doctor, who speaks fluent French, is starring alongside his idol – playing a doctor – in the drama Peaceful, thought to be coming to British cinemas later this year.“She was very down to earth and normal. I felt at ease with her,” he said.

Sara met the French director Emmanuelle Bercot at a Manhattan screening of her film La Tete Haute five years ago. They spoke about his work as an oncologist and the idea for the new film grew.

Bercot’s Peaceful (De son vivant) deals with loss and the relationship between a child and a parent, but unlike The Father, or the film starring Sophie Marceau that has just premiered at Cannes, François Ozon’s Everything Went Fine, this one deals with how a parent faces the imminent death of an adult son.

“Emmanuelle wanted to make a melodrama and there is certainly a real drama every time I take on a patient,” said Sara. “I have very strong ideas about honesty and how treatment should be and I hope this film will be a message. But when I first talked to her I had no idea at all that I would be cast in the film.” On set Sara admits he was “a little bit lost” at first. “Emmanuelle wanted to see me being natural and I didn’t understand how acting worked at the beginning.” Now he is ready to try another. “I had a ball. It was an amazing adventure. I enjoyed every part of it. I loved the perfectionism.”

 

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