Cannes: The Chess Board On The Croisette

I don’t really care much about the Cannes Film Festival anymore, because the movies that appear in competition there tend to not have an enormous effect on the domestic box office, nor do they tend to show up with any regularity in awards discussions. Sure, there are exceptions, but they tend to be in the foreign film category. Only six times in the last decade has a Cannes film been nominated for Best Picture. One of those, No Country For Old Men, actually won Best Picture, but didn’t win at Cannes.

The programmers like bringing back certain favorites, intellectual filmmakers who specialize in a certain type of high brow, navel gazing cinema, like James Gray and Paolo Sorrentino, as well as the legends for whom they feel a certain propriety, like Quentin Tarantino and Woody Allen, while ignoring the mainstream to an almost obnoxious degree.

So, I tend to not pay much attention to that aspect of it.

But ask me about what happens behind the scenes on the French Riviera, and you’ll get a different answer. That, I find fascinating.

One of my colleagues here referred to it brilliantly. “Cannes has become a chess board,” she said, and she’s right. At Cannes, a production company will announce a certain meaningful actor has joined a project, then go out and look for cash from everyone who’s there to finance the thing, now that they know this guy is on board. This also serves to raise the international profile of said meaningful actor, whose name is enough to garner said financing from said money people for said project. It’s like a whole different kind of capitalism, a sort of Ponzi scheme that feels like it shouldn’t be legal, but when you look at the big picture, it actually makes a strange bit of sense, especially since all those financiers are in Cannes for that very reason, so no one is really taking advantage of anyone. Or, to look at it another way, they’re all taking advantage of each other, but willingly and knowingly, which, let’s face it, is the best way to do it.

This isn’t Sundance — another festival that isn’t what it used to be anymore, but that’s a whole different column — in which a film shows up completely finished and looking for a distributor, this is now something of a smorgasbord in which a project can find all the missing ingredients it needs in order to get cameras rolling. One could even say, in fact, that because of the way the system now works, it’s a crucial part of the process. Studios aren’t making as many films anymore, which means independent financiers and production companies need to step in and fill the void, especially in that key $15-75 million dollar film area. Enter the international sales market at Cannes, and voilá, your stalled project is suddenly set to go because you’ve attached Bryan Cranston and Sebastian Stan and now you have a bunch of European rich guys lining up, begging you to take their money.

The cynics might say that this is a shame, that it puts a negative twist on the pomp and circumstance of the festival and what it has represented for the last 60-plus years, but I dismiss that as nonsense. On the contrary, this is definitely a positive move, because it adds substance to what I think most people consider to be a lot of silliness. What used to be a place where the only thing happening was stars striding up a red carpet and the premieres of a few movies most of us would never see, is now a center for all kinds of news about one project after another finding a new life and soon to be coming to a theater near us.

This is not to say, by the way, that the rest of it is a total waste of time. It’s not. There is still a bit of pomp and circumstance that gets people’s blood pumping, star-studded movie premieres that attract the press and fill the celebrity magazines. I mean, big studio movies have premieres all over the world, why shouldn’t some of them do it at Cannes if they have the chance, like the George Clooney-Julia Roberts flick Money Monster did?

There’s another thing that Cannes provides that we don’t get to see so much anymore in an industry that seems like its constantly in flux: tradition. For one thing, Cannes continues to ignore television, thereby refusing to follow in the footsteps of other major festivals like Sundance and Toronto. For Cannes, it’s film today, film tomorrow, film forever, and there’s something oddly reassuring about that. Doubt it? Look at how the folks over there have welcomed Amazon (five films playing there are Amazon Studios pictures), while vilifying Netflix. It would seem to be a natural thing to put them in the same category, but since Amazon has plans to release its films to theaters and observe the 90-day theatrical window — as opposed to Netflix’s Day-and-Date plan — and claims an “auteur comes first” attitude, it fits right in over there, while Netflix is (wrongly) heckled for “destroying cinema.”

The industry is in a constant state of flux, but things don’t change nearly as rapidly on the Croisette. Behind the scenes, sure, the market has adapted as it has needed to, but in the limelight? Front and center? There are still celebrities walking the red carpets in front of thousands of flashing bulbs, still 12-minute standing ovations for the lucky films and shouting boos for the unlucky ones, and still an ongoing glimpse into the long faded, glamorous days of Old Hollywood.

It’s an odd mix, to be sure, and something of a paradox. The public face remains unmoving and unchanged, perhaps unwilling to do so, while the other face, the one behind the scenes, more properly reflects where the industry is headed. There’s something about the whole thing that’s really quite … well, French.

Cannes has its own aesthetic, for better or worse, and if we’re being honest, it probably couldn’t care less about a single word I’ve written here. Which, I suppose, is as it should be.

Neil Turitz is a filmmaker and journalist who has spent close to two decades in the independent film world and writing about Hollywood. Aside from being a screenwriter/director and Tracking Board columnist, he is also a senior editor at SSN Insider.