Cannes film festival to open with Great Gatsby

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Posted: 10 years ago

Cannes film festival to open with Great Gatsby glamour

nBaz Luhrman's 1920s extravaganza to open 66th festival and cement Surrey girl Carey Mulligan's arrival in Hollywood A-list

Great Gatsby
Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, which will be shown at the Cannes film festival. Photograph: Daniel Smith/AP

Many people might think The Great Gatsby has already had a premiere with reviews from American screenings widely available. But for its British star, Carey Mulligan, the red carpet Cannes screening of Baz Luhrmann's 3D extravaganza on Wednesday evening will secure her position among the top flight of international talent.

  1. The Great Gatsby
  2. Production year: 2013
  3. Country: Rest of the world
  4. Cert (UK): 12A
  5. Runtime: 143 mins
  6. Directors: Baz Luhrmann
  7. Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Callan McAuliffe, Carey Mulligan, Elizabeth Debicki, Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire
  8. More on this film

The film will officially open the annual event in the south of France, regarded as the leading festival in the cinema industry's calendar. Mulligan is expected to attend alongside Lurhrman and her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, and will be the glamorous focus of the most high-profile function of the fortnight.

The actor from Surrey, who is married to Marcus Mumford of the award-winning band Mumford and Sons, is to have a second moment of glory later in the festival when she appears in the new Coen brothers' film about country music, Inside Llewyn Davis. Mulligan stars opposite Justin Timberlake and John Goodman in a film that critics are predicting may prove to be one of the hits of Cannes 2013.

After taking on the role of Daisy Buchanan, made famously stylish by Mia Farrow in the 1974 version of F Scott Fitzgerald's novel, Mulligan is next set to tackle the role that helped to establish Julie Christie as the leading British female star of her generation: Bathsheba Everdene in Far From the Madding Crowd. The actor, who will celebrate her 28th birthday shortly after the festival closes on 26 May, was the first choice of the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg to play the part in his radical retelling of Thomas Hardy's rural saga.

The character of Bathsheba is wilder and more spirited than Fitzgerald's fragile heroine in The Great Gatsby, but like Dais, she is the beautiful object of desire at the heart of an ill-starred love story. Matthew Goode, recently seen in Stoker, and Matthias Schoenaerts, star of Rust and Bone, are expected to play opposite Mulligan as the soldier Sergeant Troy and the shepherd Gabriel Oak, parts taken by Terence Stamp and Alan Bates in the 1967 John Schlesinger film.

Vinterberg made his name with the 1998 film Festen and is one of the founder members of the Dogme collective of directors set up in 1995 to promote the idea of filming with natural light and the minimum of artifice. He recently impressed critics with his Danish language film, The Hunt, which earned Mads Mikkelsen a best actor prize at Cannes last year. Vinterberg has been looking for an English language project, but he is an unexpected choice to handle an adaptation of a English literary classic.

The screenplay for the film, which is being backed by BBC Films, DNA Films and Fox Searchlight, is being written by David Nicholls, who adapted Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 2008 for the BBC series starring Gemma Arterton and Eddie Redmayne.

Mulligan started her career winning praise for performances in Pride and Prejudice, in which she shared a screen with Keira Knightley, and in the television adaptation of Bleak House. She won an international reputation for her portrayal of the studious young woman in An Education, the film based on the early life of the former Observer journalist Lynn Barber.

Since then she has taken risks by accepting a role in Steve McQueen's challenging film about sexual addiction, Shame, and starred opposite Ryan Gosling in the acclaimed thriller Drive. While Mulligan promises to be the most prominent British attraction in this year's Cannes festival, there are a few other contenders. The Selfish Giant, the second film from Clio Barnard, the British director who made The Arbor, is a present-day reworking of Oscar Wilde's fairlytale and is playing in the Directors' Fortnight, while For Those In Peril, a debut from the young Scottish film-maker Paul Wright, will screen as part of Critics' Week.

Stephen Frears's drama, Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight, is a look at the boxing champion's period as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war and will also screen out of the main competition.

Finally, a week ago festival organisers announced that the latest film by Jim Jarmusch, who made his name in 1984 with Stranger Than Paradise, will be in the running for the Palme D'Or, the first time for the director since his 2005 entry, Broken Flowers.

It may not sound like a British film, but it was made independently by the veteran London producer Jeremy Thomas and it stars British actors Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as two vampires who have loved each other for centuries.

Excluded from the original line-up announced three weeks ago, it was given a late reprieve by Cannes selectors.

THE CV

¦ Born 28 May 1985, London. Her father was an executive for InterContinental hotel group and she lived in Hanover and Dsseldorf.

¦ In 1999, she moved back to the UK and began acting when at Woldingham, an independent Catholic boarding school in Surrey. She met Julian Fellowes, who visited the school to give a talk, and he arranged an audition for the part of Kitty Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, which she won. She was soon appearing at the Royal Court, and in Bleak House, then as Jenny in An Education - for which she was nominated for an Oscar and won the best actress Bafta in 2010.

¦ She has starred in Hollywood films Drive, Shame and in Baz Luhrmann's remake of The Great Gatsby.

¦ She is married to her childhood penpal Marcus Mumford from Mumford & Sons. They live in London.

Posted: 10 years ago

Cannes film festival opens with fittingly lavish 'Great Gatsby'

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By Belinda Goldsmith

LONDON | Mon May 13, 2013 8:19am EDT

(Reuters) - The 2013 Cannes film festival opens on Wednesday with Baz Luhrmann's 3D version of "The Great Gatsby", a lavish throwback to the "Roaring Twenties" that befits the glamour and excess of the world's biggest cinema showcase.

The Australian director's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel starring Leonardo DiCaprio surprised some Hollywood insiders, because Cannes traditionally launches on the palm-lined French Riviera with a splashy world premiere.

But "The Great Gatsby" has already opened in the United States to mixed reviews and solid box office, potentially dampening buzz surrounding the start of 12 days of screenings, champagne-fuelled parties and dealmaking.

Stars expected to face a phalanx of flash bulbs along the red carpet include Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling, Emma Watson and Bollywood veteran Amitabh Bachchan.

Their pictures will undergo one of the most grueling tests in movie making - pleasing Cannes' notoriously picky critics who regularly boo as the credits roll if they are unhappy.

And behind the scenes at the event, up to 40,000 film professionals will be seeking to buy and sell the next box office hit at the most important movie market of the year.

"This is the hardest 10 days of the year for me. There are always three or four movies that are exceptional and you have to find them so it is a detective job," said Tom Bernard, co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics.

Critics have praised the selection of films being screened at the 66th Cannes festival, saying it is a strong, well-curated list ranging from hotly-anticipated potential crowd pleasers to beautifully-crafted, artistic cinema.

STRONG U.S. SHOWING

American directors have their biggest showing in six years in the main competition at Cannes, making up five of 20 films vying for the coveted Palme D'Or for best picture awarded by a jury headed by Steven Spielberg on the final day, May 26.

Steven Soderbergh's "Behind The Candelabra", starring Douglas as the gay pianist Liberace and Damon as his young lover, is already generating huge interest, particularly as Soderbergh has hinted that this could be his last movie.

Also in focus is Joel and Ethan Coen's "Inside Llewyn Davis" about New York's gritty 1960s folk music scene, James Gray's "The Immigrant", Jim Jarmusch's vampire movie "Only Lovers Left Alive", and Alexander Payne's "Nebraska".

French filmmakers are also well represented with five films in the main competition, including Roman Polanski's French-language "La Venus a la Fourrure" (Venus in Fur), a backstage drama starring his wife Emmanuelle Seigner.

Two Japanese movies are in the running and one each from China, Chad, Mexico, Iran, Tunisia, Italy and the Netherlands while Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's "Only God Forgives" with Ryan Gosling in a Thai gangland thriller is creating buzz.

Critics have earmarked "Le Passe" by Iran's Asghar Farhadi and "Like Father, Like Son" by leading Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda as strong domestic dramas. Farhadi won an Oscar for best foreign language film in 2012 for "A Separation".

Despite criticism of an all-male lineup last year, only one woman director has made the 2013 competition. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, sister of former French first lady Carla Bruni, is in the field with "Un Chateau en Italie".

The sidebar section, Un Certain Regard, set up to recognize young filmmakers, will feature 19 films including "The Bling Ring" by Sofia Coppola starring Harry Potter actress Emma Watson about a real-life gang stealing from celebrities' homes.

"It is a strong line-up this year looking at the names of the directors, especially those in competition," said Wendy Mitchell, editor of the magazine Screen International.

"There are some very sellable films this year and the fact that business was down at the Berlin festival (in February) usually means that there will be keen buyers at Cannes."

Out of competition, hundreds of films will be shown in special sessions while 4,000 or so films, many yet to be made, will be haggled over in meetings along the Croisette, the resort's chic promenade, or on extravagant yachts moored nearby.

Patrick Wachsberger, co-chairman of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, said he never had time to go to screenings but used Cannes to build buzz for new films including the second and third Hunger Games movies that start shooting later this year.

"You meet with distributors every 30 minutes and it really like going to the dentist," said Wachsberger. "The business seems more complicated than it used to be and a bit more frantic but the money at stake is higher and it's a bigger gamble."

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith; editing by Mike Collett-White)

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