Denis Villeneuve (in the blue suit) arrives at the Palme d'Or jury press conference Tuesday. Villeneuve acknowledges he's desperate for a break and more time with his children, but he couldn't pass up the jury offer from Cannes.
Denis Villeneuve says he'll 'fight for filmmakers' on Cannes jury
The sole Canadian member of the Palme d'Or jury panel at the Cannes Film Festival, wants to be an advocate for cinema and its makers.
By Peter HowellMovie Critic
Thu., May 10, 2018timer5 min. read
CANNES, FRANCE —Denis Villeneuve vowed he was going to take a badly needed rest after making five films in six years, a remarkable run from Prisoners to Blade Runner 2049 that made the Montreal director a hot Hollywood commodity.
He didn't foresee coming to the south of France to sit on the Palme d'Or jury at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, a nine-member international panel headed by Aussie actress Cate Blanchett that will dole out the gold at festival's end on May 19. He's the only Canadian member.
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"My dream was to go back to Montreal and to just cook for the kids," he says of his plan to relax with his wife, Tanya Lapointe, and his three children from a previous relationship, all in their teens and early 20s.
"Just to drink coffee in the morning, (and) I have one decision to make: it's what we are going to eat tonight."
This was indeed the idea, which he now sheepishly declares to be "half a failure," because life intervened in the form of "a screenplay that needed work" for his next film: a blockbuster adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune, due in 2020, which may in fact turn out to be two films.
Then came the jury offer from Cannes, which he was honoured to take up, and which he's finding to be the proverbial change that's as good as a rest. He's excited and also a little fearful about his task of watching and judging 21 Palme contenders over the course of a festival fortnight, along with the other jury members: fellow directors Ava DuVernay, Andrei Zvyagintsev and Robert Guédiguian; actors Blanchett, Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux and Chang Chen; and singer-songwriter Khadja Nin.
"So I can say I have a kind of vacation," Villeneuve, 50, tells a trio of Toronto journalists, as he arrives for an interview in the Palais des Festivals, in a room overlooking the sunny Riviera, with yachts parked in the Cannes harbor.
"Cannes is the best way to stop the screenwriting process … I take this (jury) responsibility very seriously, to watch people who I admire, who I deeply admire, and the movies … to digest them and to think."
There's now grey in his beard and hair that wasn't there in 1997, when Villeneuve first came to Cannes with an omnibus film called Cosmos, directed by him and five other young Quebec filmmakers, based on the adventures of a Montreal taxi driver.
This was followed a year later with his solo feature debut August 32nd on Earth, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard program, an existential romance with a title that hinted at his sci-fi blockbusters to come.
Villeneuve has also had a film in the Palme competition, the drug war thriller Sicario in 2015, so he knows what it's like to be a director awaiting a Cannes verdict. He's also had previous jury experience, having once sat on a Festival du nouveau cinema panel in Montreal.
He wants to see each of the Palme contenders "like a virgin," without any advance bias, so much so that he kept his eyes closed Tuesday when clips of all 21 films were screened during the festival's gala opening ceremony in the giant Lumière Theatre within the Palais.
"I don't see myself as someone who would judge, but someone who will fight for filmmakers," Villeneuve says.
"I want to be there for them. I want to love, try to love. I am going there fully open. And hoping to deeply love a film and defend it. I would love to be that."
He'll be championing a diverse slate of directors and films that include such Cannes veterans as Jean-Luc Godard (The Image Book), Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman), Asghar Farhadi (Everybody Knows) and Jia Zhangke (Ash Is Purest White), along with such Palme comp newcomers as Iran's Jafar Panahi (3 Faces) and Russia's Kirill Serebrennikov (Summer), two directors who, at time of writing, may be unable accompany their films here due to travel restrictions placed on them by regressive regimes at home.
Villeneuve is sworn to secrecy about the discussions within the Palme panel, but he allows that jury president Blanchett "really wants to create a bond" among the jurors.
"I cannot talk a lot about that, but I would say so far, so great."
The jury meets in private but it watches the films in public along with other cinephiles. Villeneuve is passionate about the "collective tension" of watching films in a traditional movie theatre with an audience.
"I'm old-fashioned. I'm old school. I deeply love the big screen. I deeply love the communal experience of watching a movie together."
But Villeneuve is also cautious. He's reluctant to take a side in the ongoing feud between Cannes and theatre-averse online giant Netflix. The streamer's refusal to commit to a theatrical release of its films in France led to several Netflix films not playing at Cannes 2018, including Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, which was specifically shot to be shown on as large a screen as possible.
Instead, Roma will join a Netflix queue on somebody's computer screen, just another film to click through among many, a reality that Villeneuve says "traumatizes" him.
"They have to stop thinking about movies as content. It needs to be an art piece. But then, at the same time, (Netflix) gives a lot of freedom to filmmakers and that's what I'm hearing."
He knows the movie industry is changing and he might one day make a Netflix film himself, but the definition of what exactly constitutes a film will also require some rethinking.
"All my movies are made for the big screen, with the pretention and arrogance of the way I edit them. It's for the big screen. So if I make a movie for Netflix, it won't be the same. I have to transform the language … it doesn't mean it's not cinema, it's just means that there's a transformation … does it make sense?"
Everybody in the movie industry is grappling with the same issue, so the uncertainty behind it certainly makes sense.
But for the moment, Villeneuve can just settle back and play the role of movie watcher, which could also include taking in, if his jury duties permit, a 50th anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the sci-fi classic that sparked his early love for movies and which has been hugely influential on his work as a director.
And when he gets back to Montreal, he can resume cooking dinner for his three kids — although he thinks they may already getting sick of roast duck, his specialty. He used to hunt ducks with his dad, growing up in Gentilly, a village on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, near Trois-Rivières.
"I'm from duck country. I'm from a duck hunter, so I love duck. (The kids) are tired of eating duck. In fact, they just turned out (to be) vegetarians! Maybe too much duck!"
Peter Howell is the Star's movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays. Howell's accommodation in Cannes has been provided by the Cannes Film Festival.
Netflix, Cannes Film Festival, France