Speaking at the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia this week, Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux spoke with passion about his love of cinema. “If you love cinema, cinema will love you,” he said with emphasis. He also sought to explain what made a “good film” for the world’s leading film festival.
Frémaux, who is at Red Sea to present his documentary “Lumière! The Adventure Continues,” emphasized that he would step down if his abilities as the festival’s artistic chief failed him. “One day it will be my destiny to do a bad selection,” he said. “If I do a second bad selection the next year, I will leave. I will say: I am not connected anymore with the cinema of my times.”
Asked to define what made a “good film,” Frémaux said: “I think there are two answers. The first answer is that it is your own taste and you are supposed to have good taste, which is true in my case,” he said with a smile, his sense of humor warmly appreciated by the Saudi audience.
“The second answer is exactly what we do in Cannes. It is not about: This is good, this is bad. It is not about: I love it, I hate it. It’s about: Does this film deserve to win Cannes or not? Do we [derive] any advantage from showing this film? That means that sometimes there are a lot of films I love, but I think that they are not for Cannes. It doesn’t mean that the film is uncool, that I don’t like them, it means that there is a certain type of cinema that we must show in Cannes, that it is important for them to be there.”
Frémaux added: “Cannes is a big once a year photograph of what cinema is. So, this or that film, which might not be to my taste, but must be there because it shows something about what cinema is today.”
He recalled the first time he went to Cannes in 1979, the year that “Apocalypse Now” screened. He drove to Cannes by car, he said, without any accreditation, and at night he would sleep in his car. “Although I didn’t see any movies that year, I was there,” he recalled, his passion for the event still evident in his voice. He said he would always want to be part of cinema. When he was 80 years old, he would be happy to be the guy sitting in the box office of his local movie theater handing the audience their tickets.
He underscored the importance of cinema for him. “I still think that cinema is one of the most important things in culture and society. We used to say that May 1968, which was a very big political event in France, with protests against the government, started not in May, but in February, when the government wanted to fire Henri Langlois, the head of the La Cinémathèque française. I’m not sure it’s really true, but I like this idea that cinema was so much inside society, that everything about cinema was about society.”
Talking about how he defined a movie buff, and how he knew when he became one, he said: “When you start to talk about films under the name of the filmmaker, not under the name of the actors, that it is a sign that you’re a movie buff, because it’s about auteurs: it’s about John Ford, not about John Wayne. It’s about Martin Scorsese not about Bob De Niro – even though John Wayne and Bob De Niro are great. And so, little by little, you feel that it will be something, and I felt cinema will be the thing of my life.”
He underscored Cannes’ universal appeal and character. “It is not our festival, not mine; Cannes is your festival. Cannes is not a French film festival. It’s a festival that takes place in France. It’s a world film festival,” he said.
He also discussed “the stress about having a good selection.” He said: “As we are talking this morning, a lot of filmmakers are shooting or editing their films, and I’m here waiting for them, the known, the unknown, the surprises, the disappointments. We are going to experience the same thing every year.”
He said that he focused on the whole of Official Selection in Cannes. “We pay the same attention to everything we have, wherever you are, in Competition, Out of Competition, Midnight Screening and so on.” But some films stood out. “This year we saw ‘The Substance,’ the Coralie Fargeat movie with Demi Moore. It’s a body horror film. It’s a genre pic. So a good idea would have been to put it as a Midnight Screening, but the film had something more, and especially the filmmaking, because any genre film must be well directed. If not, there is no interest. So we put it in Competition and it worked. And even some of the producers of the film, before I saw the film, didn’t know what to do with the film. And I said to them, it’s a very good film. And they said, ‘Are you sure?’ [I replied,] ‘Yes, I will prove it.’ And there is now almost $100 million box office worldwide, and the film is going on an Academy Award campaign, and so on, and why [did I know this]? Because I have good taste. But it’s not about my taste, but because of my knowledge, my education, my passion for the history of cinema, because George Romero was one of my heroes. In Cannes, there is not a snobbish selection.”
He attends all the premieres, he said, and suggests that photographers and journalists should be there too, because “at 10pm, you never know who this unknown Thai filmmaker is. This unknown Thai filmmaker was Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and he got the Palme d’Or [for “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”], so they had their photo of the [film’s director and cast].”
He also spoke about the selection of “Top Gun: Maverick” in 2022. “It’s a good film. It’s very good for what it is for, what is the result of the film. And it was a triumph, but Tom Cruise inside the room was innocent, stressed and afraid about the reception of the room because he was in Cannes and if the film is not good, you can feel it. And, of course, sometimes we maybe make a mistake. That’s why I am difficult and tough because it’s the same challenge for us that it must be a success for the film, if not, everyone is unhappy, everyone is sad about what they see and sometimes, and I must confess, more in the past, not now, but some gems have been killed and sometimes killed in May and alive in October. You feel it because it’s a very demanding audience and a very warm audience too.”
He said critics are “not as happy they used to be” and “they are not the kings of the world anymore,” because of the rise of social media, but, he added, “I think that we still have to support them. You need to read what the critics write, whether you agree with them or not.”
He added that “time was the greatest critic,” and – like other great artists – some filmmakers would not be recognized in their own lifetime. “Everyone knows Mozart died almost unknown. That Van Gogh never had the celebrity he has today. So time is the best critic,” he said. “So maybe the thing which is supposed to be the less important will be the more important in one century and in contemporary cinema it is the same.”
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