A Cannes art gallery was transformed into a casino for a party last Sunday night when guests were invited for "an evening of champagne, canapes and roulette" to celebrate the shooting of the new Neil Jordan movie, Double Down, in the south of France. With three weeks' shooting to go, the Irish director was in relaxed form as he introduced us to the film's stars, which include Nick Nolte and director Emir Kusturica, a two-time winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
A thriller starring Nolte as a gambler who sets out to rob a Monte Carlo casino, Double Down is loosely based on a 1950s film noir by Jean-Pierre Melville, Bob le Flambeur. Although admitting that his French is "terrible", Jordan says that working in France has been a pleasure. "I'm tired of the dominance of American movies over everything, every facet of film-making and cinema-going," he said. "I just think it's time to make a move back to Europe. It's time European directors made films with reach, punch and intellectual ambition."
Jordan's future projects as a director include a major historical drama based on the Borgias and the film of Peter Carey's new novel about the Australian outlaw, Ned Kelly. He also plans to produce Conor McPherson's film, Actors, which is likely to star Alan Rickman, Dylan Moran and Minnie Driver.
THE Irish and the Italians at Cannes got out of the blazing sunshine on Tuesday afternoon for a forum in the CineCitta Pavilion to discuss co-productions between the two countries. The session was chaired by Siobhan O'Donoghue of Media Desk Ireland, which organised the event, and Luciana Castellina, president of Cinema Italia. The panel included Liam O'Neill of Paradox Pictures in Dublin and Irish Film Board chief executive Rod Stoneman.
Not a lot of people know this, but there have already been three Irish-Italian coproductions - Guiltrip, Nora and the recently completed How Harry Became a Tree.
THE popular Thai cowboy movie, Tears of the Black Cowboy, is the first film from Thailand ever selected for the official programme at Cannes. To celebrate the event, there was a boisterous beach party where we sat in our deckchairs on the sand to consume a tasty Thai buffet and Singha beer while Thailand's top rock band, Mr T, performed on stage.
Among the guests was 27-year-old film director Tom Waller, who has just finished shooting his first feature film, the romantic adventure tale Butterfly Man. Although born in Bangkok to a Thai mother, Tom has spent a great deal of time in Ireland. His father, Jocelyn, is from Nenagh, and his grandfather used to run the Turf Club.
Two years ago, Tom made a short film in Ireland - Eviction, a famine drama based on a William Carleton story and starring hot young Irish actor Cillian Murphy. Now he plans to expand the story into a feature film.
THERE are so many parties at Cannes every evening that one has to be selective, so I passed on the MTV bash at the Pierre Cardin villa outside Cannes, Playboy owner Hugh Hefner's 75th birthday party at the American Pavilion, and a dubious-sounding midnight event for a porn film on an island off the coast of Cannes.
The one unmissable party was the hottest ticket of the week - a celebration of the epic $270-million Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the first part of which opens in December. In line with the scale of the movie, the party was a lavish event, and with such tight security that it was held at a secret location outside Cannes, a chateau that could only be accessed by coaches laid on by the hosts, New Line Cinema.
Some of the movie's impressive Middle Earth sets were shipped in from New Zealand, while the chateau was elaborately decorated with period trappings as hobbits greeted guests. Bars and food stations dotted the grounds with ample sustenance for the 1,000 party-goers, who included the film's director, Peter Jackson, and most of the huge cast, including Ian McKellen, Christopher Lee, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen and Elijah Wood. Among the film's international distributors at the chateau were Ronan Glennane and Linda Gardlov of Abbey Films in London, and brothers Nigel and Trevor Green from Entertainment Films in London. All four were also looking forward to their autumn/winter release schedules, which include Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There and Kirsten Sheridan's Disco Pigs.
FILM FOUR marked the Cannes premiere of its new comedy, Large, with a late-night party at a hilltop villa on Monday night. The invitation came wrapped in tiny white knickers, the significance of which eluded me because I missed the movie. The party, though, was a lively event where all the best faux-fur-lined seats were taken over by the Irish guests who included Niamh McCaul, Jane Doolan, Siobhan Farrell and Karen O'Malley from Clarence Pictures, Sharon McGarry from 20th-Century Fox, Barbara Murphy from Columbia TriStar, Gerry Butler and Tony Keating from Xtra-Vision, and the aforementioned Ronan Glennane and Linda Gardlov.
SELECTED as one of the European Film Promotion's "17 Producers on the Move" at Cannes this week is Tristan Orpen Lynch of Dublin-based Subotica Entertainment. A former dance band manager and TV and commercials producer, he has produced two feature films: Night Train, directed by his father John Lynch and starring Brenda Bleythn and John Hurt; and On the Nose, again with Bleythn, along with Robbie Coltrane and Dan Aykroyd, which is in the market at Cannes. He also produced the Irish-Canadian drama series, Random Passage, now showing on RTE. His future projects include a Spanish/French/Irish co-production, Songs For a Raggy Boy, which has attracted the interest of Aidan Quinn, and Smoking Man, a $10-million drama he plans to make in Vietnam.
SWEDISH director Torkel Knuttson took a cue from the starlets of yore at Cannes when it came to promoting his new comedy, Naked Again, in which a young man finds himself naked and lost on the day of his wedding. To draw attention to the movie, Knuttson and his brother, Morten, ran naked down the Croisette with the paparazzi in hot pursuit - until their progress was obstructed by gendarmes who held them briefly before letting the brothers off without charges.
THE introduction of the Irish Film Board's Company Development Initiative by the Minister for Arts, Heritage, the Gaeltacht and the Islands, Sile de Valera, was widely covered by the five film trade papers published daily at Cannes. However, the Hollywood Reporter's headline on the story read "Italian film fund". The paper apologised in print two days later - under the imaginative headline "Luck of the Irish".
ANOTHER of the trade papers, Moving Pictures, had egg pouring down its face after it ran a piece headlined "Oh, how the mighty have fallen", claiming that Cannes veteran Barry Norman was reduced to the ignominy of a blue press pass now that he has announced his plans to retire as the presenter of Sky's Movie Show. In the Cannes caste system, a blue press card is almost the lowest of the low, and allows admission only after those of us with white or pink cards enter a screening.
"We take it all back", read the headline two days later when Moving Pictures grovelled a correction that Norman "possesses, as he always has done, a pink pass". It added: "We'll check our facts more closely in future." And why not?
RACING down the Croisette in between movies during the week, I met an American publicist I hadn't seen in years. "Oh, you've moved to New York," she declared. When I denied this, she insisted she had read that I was director of international sales at Troma Films. Later I checked and, sure enough, the sales chief at Troma is another Michael Dwyer. However, it's not a confusion to relish. Troma are responsible for some of the tackiest low-budget movies in the market at Cannes - such as Terror Firmer, Alien Blood, Sour Apple Freezepop and Faghag.