Vanity Fair’s 2017 Cannes Film Festival Portfolio
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Hayek wears Yves Saint Laurent and a Boucheron necklace. Pinault wears Gucci.Salma Hayek, François Pinault
François Henry Pinault’s French luxury company Kering is one of the primary backers of the Cannes Film Festival—which makes the businessman and wife Salma Hayek almost regal fixtures at the festival each year.
Hayek experienced her first Cannes, at age 26, from an entirely different perspective—as a young actress debuting 1995’s Desperado, the Western action film that launched her star in America.
“I was completely new in this business, and I remember when I arrived at the red carpet I’d never seen so many photographers,” said the Mexican-born actress.
These days, Hayek and husband Pinault attend and host parties, including Kering’s lavish Women in Motion dinner—a candlelit award ceremony that honored Isabelle Huppert this year. In 2016, Pinault said the couple managed to find a memorable moment of quiet and solitude during the French Riviera’s frenzied festival.
“Last year, we escaped the madness of the red carpet, and went to have the famous bouillabaisse at Tetou,” said Pinault, “It was a peaceful moment between two lovers and a break.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Swinton wears Celine.Tilda Swinton
This year, Tilda Swinton arrived at the Cannes Film Festival to premiere Okja—Bong Joon-ho’s Neflix action-adventure movie—but she had other matters on her mind when the Oscar-winning actress set down on the French Riviera.
“I can’t pretend that I don’t always fantasize about running a jewel heist while here,” Swinton told Vanity Fair conspiratorially, a glint in her eye matching the twinkling yacht lights. “It’s got a lot to do with Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. You just look out at the ocean and fantasize about holding out on one of those boats.”
Four years ago, a band of presumably less-Oscar-decorated actors had a similar idea: “Chopard had a heist a few years ago, they took the whole safe,” Swinton recalled of the robbers, who reportedly ripped an entire safe out of a Novotel hotel room, before making off with the diamond goods. “Such a stylish way to go,” observed Swinton. “It’s the first thing I think about here!”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Mary Parent, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, Alejandro Iñárritu
When Iñárritu’s first feature, Amores Perros, won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes in 2000, it launched him as a force in international cinema. Seventeen years later, with back-to-back Oscars for The Revenant and Birdman under his belt, the Mexican filmmaker has returned to Cannes with a ground-breaking project, the festival’s first ever virtual-reality installation, Carne y Arena.
Made with his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, and producer Mary Parent, and financed by Legendary Entertainment and the Prada Foundation, Carne y Arena is a six-and-a-half-minute art installation that allows visitors to live the life of a refugee crossing the Mexican-American border.
“We were invited to Cannes... but we were resisting the idea, because Carne y Arena is not cinema,” Iñárritu said. “It’s art, it’s theater, it’s documentary. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s something new. It was very difficult, very expensive to come. But it was a great compliment... we belong to a global community of filmmakers here. So we improvised. We decided, let’s go!”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Harris wears Delpozo, Rupert Sanderson shoes, Swarovski accessories.Naomie Harris
There is no better backdrop for luxury brands to showcase than at the Cannes Film Festival. Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, and Elizabeth Taylor juxtaposed fur and jewels with film and the French Riviera in iconic photographs. And now Naomie Harris, the Oscar-nominated actress and Skyfall’s own Eve Moneypenny, carries on the glamorous tradition of dazzling at Cannes.
Last week, Harris—who is brand ambassador for Atelier Swarovski—swept into the opening ceremony wearing the brand’s new sustainable line of fine jewelry. For someone like Harris, who is attending this year’s festival in her role as ambassador, the red carpet is the main event: “The most memorable moment for me was walking the red carpet—of course, in my Swarovski—and feeling confident, beautiful, and empowered.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Jean Pigozzi, Brett Ratner
The Cap d’Antibes host with the most is Jean Pigozzi, the photographer, entrepreneur, and only son of SIMCA car company founder Henri Pigozzi. Jean’s well-documented pool party on the first Saturday afternoon of the Cannes Film Festival is famous for having drawn the likes of Naomi Campbell, Bono, and Helmut Newton. Pigozzi even takes in the occasional house guest, including Brett Ratner, the filmmaker who was forbidden from the Hotel du Cap after publishing an infamous essay about what he considered to be his unfair treatment and deplorable room assignment.
“After I was banned from the Hotel Du Cap for life, I moved into Jean’s house during the Cannes Film Festival,” said Ratner of the villa with its wraparound views of the water. “It’s fun to be here during the festival because of his famous party.”
But there are a few house guests who get higher priority over Ratner.
“Unfortunately I don’t get the best room when Mick Jagger’s in residence,” said Ratner. “When Mick’s not here, I get the best room—which is Jean’s mother’s old room—but Mick Jagger or Michael Douglas get the priority.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Elle Fanning
One of the very few downsides of coming to the Cannes Film Festival as a teenager is that it conflicts with high-school prom.
“I had to miss my senior prom for the Neon Demon premiere,” Fanning said about her first-ever trip to the French film fest last year. “My best friend and I had always planned on going to our prom together, so he flew out here and we had our prom night in Cannes. He was wearing his tux, and my mom had gotten corsages for us.”
The trip was so memorable, Fanning said, “I was nervous it wasn’t going to live up to how fun it was last year.”
Alas, the actress did not have to worry. She returned to the Croisette to premiere Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, and within minutes of reuniting with Coppola and co-star Kirsten Dunst at the famous Carlton hotel, the threesome erupted into peals of laughter and fond set memories from filming the Civil War-era thriller in New Orleans with co-stars Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell.
“It was fun, we were all together in this one house,” Fanning said of the cast in New Orleans. “Even though we are not blood-related, we were all supposed to feel like family, so we hung out together, made breakfast in character, had dance lessons and sewing lessons . . . and we did everything in our corsets and things to get used to the costumes.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Lee wears hand-painted Brittany Campbell.Spike Lee
Twenty-eight years ago, Spike Lee stunned Cannes Film Festival audiences with Do the Right Thing—the vibrant masterpiece that depicted simmering racial tensions in Brooklyn and ended with quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Nearly three decades later, Lee continues to make art with an urgency to promote social awareness, with the critically acclaimed Netflix special Rodney King, which premiered in April.
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Lee and his longtime collaborator Roger Guenveur Smith will be honored with a gala and keynote, benefiting Planned Parenthood. And Lee marked the occasion by looking back on his own career, and how it has intersected with this particular fest.
“Thirty years ago I was here with my first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee said of his director debut, which was celebrated when it premiered in 1986. “It won the Prix de Jeunesse, so I’ve always enjoyed my visits to this great festival.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Ted Sarandos
The biggest controversy at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival did not come courtesy of actors, directors, or critics—but Ted Sarandos, the Netflix chief content officer whose streaming company has two films in competition, Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories. Since the titles were announced, the festival has changed its policy so that, beginning next year, films will require French theatrical releases to be admitted to the prestigious fest. And this year’s competition has been full of spirited debate about whether Netflix (and its streaming competition) are an evil or natural evolution of the old-school cinema experience.
Sarandos’s defense?
“We’re living amid a generation that has seen every great movie ever made on a phone, so I think we all have to come to grips with where technology takes us,” Sarandos told the New York Times this week. “Why would we want to hold back a movie for an enormous number of people to enjoy throughout the entire country that a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people could see the film in Paris? It seemed to me like the right thing to do was to give the people, our subscribers, who pay to make these movies, access to them immediately all over the world.”
Meanwhile, Sarandos has had the experience of a Cannes succcess, and it has left an imprint. “Seeing Dustin Hoffman moved to tears by the standing ovation for him at the premiere for The Meyerowitz Stories was something I will never forget.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Marion Cotillard
The French Oscar winner had the honor of opening this year’s festival with Ismael’s Ghosts, a surreal drama from filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin. Though Netflix is debuting two films at this year’s fest, Cotillard has sided firmly with her country in its decision to ban films without French theatrical releases from screening in competition at the festival in the future.
“The energy that you have in a movie theater when a movie is shared, whether it’s laughter or emotion, is priceless,” said Cotillard. “The movie theater is something important, and it creates this very strong energy that is impossible when you are alone in front of your computer. I’m not sure people will watch those movies together . . . It’s another step in separating people from each other, and I think it’s sad.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Elkann wears shoes by Prada, clothes by Gucci.Ginevra Elkann
Italian filmmaker Ginevra Elkann first experienced the Cannes Film Festival as a Miramax intern, working long hours indoors, far away from the moviegoing excitement.
“I never left the office until the last day,” said Elkann, who worked on Bernardo Bertolucci and Anthony Minghella films before producing Noaz Deshe’s White Shadow, which won the Venice Film Festival’s Lion of the Future award in 2013. “This great girl that I was working for took me to the Palais du Festival to see a film. After 10 days of working, working, working, I was finally out in the theater surrounded by the history of the films that have screened there. It was a total dream come true . . . Cannes represents a real moment for this cinema world to come together.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Sharp wears Billy Reid.Alex Sharp
Though he has already won a Tony Award—for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time—English actor Alex Sharp had never been to the Cannes Film Festival before this year. Within hours of landing in France to premiere John Cameron Mitchell’s film How to Talk to Girls at Parties, the actor was in a car with co-star Elle Fanning on his way to Vanity Fair’s Cannes party at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc.
“I didn’t know that much about Cannes,” said Sharp. “Elle said it was a really beautiful party, and she has really high standards . . . We got there and immediately saw Adrien Brody, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alejandro González Iñárritu . . . It was like that game where you can have a dinner party and pick your favorite people to attend . . . all of the people I would have picked were at that party.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Collins wears Ralph and Russo and Bulgari Jewelry.Lily Collins
Five years after playing Snow White in Mirror, Mirror, actress Lily Collins found herself inside a real-life princess fantasy, at her first ever Cannes Film Festival.
“From the iconic red staircase and bright blue sea to delicious ice cream on the Croisette and hearing sounds of celebration from my balcony, it’s all been utterly unforgettable,” Collins wrote to Vanity Fair about her inaugural French Riviera fest.
The actress walked the Palais red carpet holding hands with co-star Tilda Swinton and debuted her film—Bong Joon-ho’s thought-provoking drama Okja—to critical raves. Gushed Collins, “My first Cannes experience has been a complete sensory overload.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Christie wears Fendi; Moss wears Jonathan Simkhai.Gwendoline Christie, Jane Campion, Elisabeth Moss
Nearly 25 years ago, Jane Campion made Cannes Film Festival history when she became the first—and only—female director to win the Palme d’Or for The Piano. This year, Campion is back to make festival history again, debuting the second season of SundanceTV’s Top of the Lake alongside stars Elisabeth Moss, Gwendoline Christie, and Alice Englert.
“We never thought Cannes would come to us,” Campion said about screening a TV series at the film festival, which David Lynch also did this year with Showtime’s Twin Peaks.
“And they may not have five years ago,” said Moss, “but there were many texts with many exclamation points when we heard the news that we were in.”
“This is such a treat to be here and experience this with this festival, and also just to give us a profile as a TV series,” said Campion. “It is such a competitive field out there, we want anything we can get our hands on to rise above the rest.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Jenner wears Ronald van der Kemp.Kendall Jenner
Though she came of age in front of reality cameras, Kendall Jenner, at 21, has built an enviable and internationally respected modeling career—a feat all the more impressive considering she had to create an independent identity outside her family’s ubiquitous brand to do so.
Kendall is now a mainstay in Paris, Milan, and New York, leading the pack down runways and endorsing Estée Lauder and Calvin Klein. Her decision to to trade Calabasas for European couture—with a quick pit stop in Cannes—proves there is more to Jenner than what you see through the camera.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Countess Marina Cicogna
Countess Marina Cicogna is not only the first major female Italian film producer, and one of the most powerful women in European cinema. She is also an expert on European film festivals.
“My family created the Venice Film Festival,” said Cicogna, referring to her grandfather, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, the businessman and politician who founded the festival in 1932 while working as Venice Biennale director. “Venice is more friendly in a way, but the Venice festival is a bit jealous of Cannes. Once you’re in the Palais you have to admit how really important this festival has become through the years.”
Cicogna produced many movies in the late 60s and early 70s including Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion—the 1970 Italian crime drama from Elio Petri that won both the Cannes festival grand prize and the best foreign-language Oscar. So she’s had success here, Cicogna admits, but never much enjoyment: “It’s become all about the parties, the security, and showing off—so I don’t find it fun.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Todd Haynes
It’s been almost two decades since Todd Haynes debuted Velvet Goldmine at Cannes—his 70s glam-rock drama dripping in excess. The film won the fest’s prize for best artistic contribution, but Haynes—who has since made sumptuous period dramas Far from Heaven, Carol, and this year’s Wonderstruck—remembers what happened after hours most of all.
“It really was the party to end all parties,” Haynes said of the Velvet Goldmine festival soiree, which was so fittingly lavish for the film that it is forever catalogued “in Cannes lore” by those who attended.
“It was in a chateau in a field, and they literally did projections into the sky of color and light. I was probably super high,” Haynes laughed, “but I still think this really happened . . . It was a lot of drinks, a lot of drugs, a lot of debauchery. It was totally appropriate for the film.”
Photograph by Justin Bishop.Sofia Coppola and Elle Fanning
Nearly four decades after her first trip to the Cannes Film Festival, to see her father premiere Apocalypse Now, Sofia Coppola has made her own fest history by winning Best Director for her fabulous, feminist take on The Beguiled. Recalling her first festival, at the age of seven, Coppola told Vanity Fair, "It was the 70s, and there were hippies and this festive atmosphere. It was a circus but fun, glamorous...festive."
This time around, Coppola is the filmmaker being feted, by winning the top Director award on Sunday--making her the first woman in 56 years to take the prize.
Fittingly, The Beguiled is a sumptuous, feminist retelling of a 70s drama, starring Clint Eastwood. Coppola told Vanity Fair that she never intended on remaking a movie, but once production designer Anne Ross (Lost in Translation, Somewhere) planted the idea, Coppola couldn't let it go.
"It was fun to think about how I would do that same story, but kind of forget the 1971 movie version and do a new version," Coppola said of the film, which stars Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell, and reunites the filmmaker with her muses Kirsten Dunst (The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette) and Elle Fanning (Somewhere). "Also, the idea of women left behind in wartime in the South is very exotic."
Photograph by Justin Bishop. Gainsbourg wears Saint Laurent.Charlotte Gainsbourg
The French actress and star of Ismael’s Ghosts has such deep roots at the Cannes Film Festival—her parents Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin were some of the coolest regulars on the Croisette in the late 60s and 70s—that Gainsbourg’s first Cannes memory predates her acting debut.
“My mother was premiering a film called La Pirate,” Gainsbourg said, referencing the 1984 lesbian romance starring Birkin. “That film was booed from the very beginning credits . . . It was a traumatic experience.”
Twenty-five years later, when Gainsbourg debuted the controversial Lars Von Trier film Antichrist, she steeled herself for similar feedback.
“I thought [it] would be a horrible screening with people shouting and throwing things,” recalled Gainsbourg, who ended up winning the fest’s best-actress award for her performance. “I was kind of disappointed because it was so calm and respectful and easy.”
