Screen deities float about annual Cannes Film Festival

Articles: Screen deities float about annual Cannes Film Festival

Posted by admin on Friday, May 14, 2004 - 12:48 AM

CANNES, France — A boatload of cast and crew showed up for Troy's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival here, including most of the Trojans and the Spartans.
That translates to Brad Pitt (Achilles), Eric Bana (Hector), Saffron Burrows (Andromache), Brian Cox (Agamemnon), Brendan Gleeson (Menelaus), Diane Kruger (Helen), Orlando Bloom (Paris) and Sean Bean (Odysseus). Some purists carped about why such trifling matters as Zeus and the other gods were deleted, but director Wolfgang Petersen said, "Homer was a genius getting the story right for his audience, 500 or 600 years after the fact, so I'm confident that he'd look down at us today, smile and say, 'Take the gods out.' " In some ways, Petersen's Troy is about the power of fame, since having his name last for eternity spurs Achilles into battle. Asked about the fleeting nature of fame, Pitt recalled mentioning "to some younger-generation actors that (Oscar winner) Julie Christie (who plays Achilles' mother, Thetis)had signed on, and they asked 'Who's Julie Christie?' "It all fades. Enjoy it while you can," Pitt said. Any more Greek epics for Pitt? "I feel like I've done it. I'm done with the skirt," Pitt said, shaking what would have been his hair if he hadn't shaved it down to fuzz. Pitt said wife Jennifer Aniston "liked the costume." And, yes, he did see the final episode of her sitcom, Friends. "And it was gooood." The star of the press conference was Burrows, who nimbly related TheIliad to the poetry of John Keats and the Trojan War to the present moment. This could be an interesting year for jury deliberations. Jury president Quentin Tarantino — who took the red carpet arm-in-arm with frequent companion and fellow director Sofia Coppola — has already riled Tilda Swinton, star of the current Young Adam. When a Taiwanese film critic asked Tarantino why Hollywood dominates world cinema, he rambled on about the need for film diversity. Then he concluded, "At the end of the day, people go to see films to see stars. When a country has a star system, people will show up. The three countries that have stars," Tarantino added, "are the U.S., India and Hong Kong." Swinton, who is British, objected. No culture can rely on only one kind of film, she said, adding that multiplexing has wiped out independent theaters and with that, the possibility of seeing diverse films. "And you can't only exist on industrial cinema," she shot back. "Britain in its heyday of the 1960s had every kind of cinema," Tarantino rebutted. "If you're talking only about stars," Swinton said. "That's not the only thing cinema has to offer." The room was hushed at having seen what could be the first skirmish in a jury war. If Cannes has another bad year for films like last year, the jury deliberations might be the best show in town.

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