By Cannes International Film Festival and M&C Movie News
May 20, 2007, 10:00 GMT
Day 4 at the Cannes International Film Festival saw a live concert by U2 as well as the Out of Competition presentation of the documentary “U2 3D.”
05/18/2007 - Jessica Simpson - 2007 Cannes Film Festival - Blonde and Blonder - Budweiser Party - May 18, 2007 - The Budweiser Select Yacht - Cannes, France © Solarpix / Photorazzi
Also screened was the Un Certain Regard: "The Band's Visit" by Israeli director Eran Kolirin and Out of Competition screening of the documentary The 11th Hour produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Below you will find notes on the press conferences and to the right you will find a Gallery of pictures from Day 4 at Cannes.
Press Conference: "U2 3D"
Catherine Owens on the choice of songs: "I think it was a joint choice between the band and myself. I chose to keep it very focused on the performance. In general with my own work, I like to reduce things to the essence or the core and from U2’s point of view, they had already made a film called "Rattle and Hum", where they did a lot of behind the scenes, band interviews…and because the concept we decided on was really about their performance - their relationship with each other as they performed and then their relationship with the audience as an extension of that performance - we really thought it would be far more challenging to make this the absolute pure core of who they are without any kind of distractions. The challenge was to create a narrative, to create an arc within the performance."
The U2 3D crew was on hand for the Out of Competition presentation of U2 3D scheduled for a midnight showing Sunday May 19. The panel facing the press was composed of the director Catherine Owens and producers Sandy Climan and John Modell. Excerpts follow.
Catherine Owens on the intentions of the film: "I have a long collaborative relationship with U2. I make a lot of their visual content for their shows, so in many ways I’ve done very good research work for this film. I have an awareness of 3D films and we saw some tests when we were first approached to make this film. Although the 3D that was in place at the time, it wasn’t necessarily our language because U2’s way of working is very organic and they tend to follow one idea with another idea. We felt that if we could bring a different type of experience then this medium could really work for us. We decided to bring a very intimate experience based on the band’s relationship with each other on stage, using the scale of the technology and the intimacy of the band."
Sandy Climan on the 3D process: "Hopefully what you will all see is a blending of creativity and physics. What reality digital has done is to have production, post-production and exhibition of our friends in real 3D that will for the first time put you in the best seat in the house, will give you a view of the stage, from the audience, in the audience, around the audience. It’s a record of this concert that is almost sculptural. The visualization of this will hopefully mean that you viscerally experience the music."
John Modell on technological advancements: "A paradigm shift we talk about a lot is going from silent to talkies, or from black and white to color. We think this is a key change with regards to both digital delivery and also 3D. We all see in 3D in real life and every technological advancement in film has always been about bringing you closer and immersing you into the story or the emotion of what you’re watching. Especially with this special group of artists, the apparatus becomes totally transparent and you are in their bubble, in their zone and you feel these songs like never before."
Un Certain Regard: "The Band's Visit" by Eran Kolirin
Presented in the section Un Certain Regard, The Band's Visit is 34-year-old Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin's first feature-length film. This whimsical tale, in the running for a Caméra d'Or award, follows the iconoclastic adventures of a band of Egyptian musicians who, by some happenstance, are lost in a small town in the Israeli desert. The monotonous daily routine of the inhabitants is about to be shaken up…
"When I was a child, I often watched Egyptian films with my family", mused Eran Kolirin. "It was a common practice in Israel in the early 1980s. In the late afternoon on Friday, we'd be glued to the screen, watching complicated intrigues, impossible loves, and heartbreaking tear-jerkers starring Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamam, I’del Imam, and all the other regulars, on the only national television network Israel had at the time. It was pretty strange, in fact, for a country that spent half its time at war with Egypt and the other half in a sort of cold and barely cordial peace with its neighbor to the south."
Press Conference: "The 11th Hour"
For the occasion of the Out of Competition screening of the documentary The 11th Hour, the two directors Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners were present along with producer Leonardo DiCaprio and two experts who participated in the making of the film, Kenny Ausubel and David Orr. Highlights.
Leonardo DiCaprio spoke about his role as producer: "When you make a movie, the director is God, but when you make a documentary, God is the director. We essentially took what the scientists and some of the greatest thinkers in the world had to say and tried to put it into an hour and a half format. It was a very complicated process, but we let them dictate what this film was ultimately about. My position was to ask the questions and get the real story."
Nadia Conners talked about the film: "It’s not that things have necessarily gotten worse, it’s perhaps that the response has not been strong enough. One thing about our film is that it is a reaction to a lack of response that we need in order to turn this thing around. When you say that our film has a tone of much greater urgency, I think that is part of the reason, because we really need to be pushing policy. We really need to be active socially and doing as much as we can. The other reason is that this is a particularly complex issue. And the media, especially in the United States, hasn’t taken the time to fully understand this issue and how it is connected to so many other aspects of our lives. So I think that what we need to do is to put all of that into one place and when you do that, it does create quite an intense experience."
About the non-participation of President Georges W. Bush:
Leonardo DiCaprio: "I’m just going to make this very simple because it’s the truth. He has done very little for the environmental movement."
David Orr: "The Bush record is a really short record and deserves a short answer. There just isn’t a good one. This administration has chosen not to lead, not even to get into the game."
Kenny Ausubel: "What’s good about Bush is that he revealed the absolute bankruptcy of this way of thinking and of doing things and the incredible political and corporate corruption at the center of it."
David Orr on using the medium of film: "The beauty of this film for me as an outsider in the film industry was that Leo, Nadia and Leila took their skills in cinematographic arts and distilled the science, a very complicated science, into an art form. Art, as I understand it, is about beauty. Beauty will move us, but fear won’t move us for very long, very well or very far."
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