The Daily 2013

Johnnie To, Sammi Cheng, Andy Lau, and Ka Fai Wai were at Cannes for the press conference of Blind Detective. Selected highlights.Johnnie To, on food:Basically, I love eating and my characters are just like me. Those who watch my films are well aware of this. In my features films, there are numerous dining scenes. Action and food is...

In Competition with the "survival" film, Wara No Tate, the Japanese filmmaker gave his press conference in the company of his starring actors, Nanako Matsushima and Takao Osawa.Takashi Miike on the "giri", a Japanese term that suggests duty and moral and social obligation:When you describe human beings, you show them in all their...

A couple who perfectly encapsulated the spirit of cinema: Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, photographed on the set of Melville Shavelson's A New Kind of Love (1963). For the Festival, this is a chance to pay tribute to the memory of Paul Newman, who died in 2008 and to Joanne Woodward, his wife and actress of choice. The image of this...

   The actors and directors expected to be in attendance in Cannes today are:   Jason ABALOS     Hany ABU-ASSAD     Zoya AKHTAR     Adolfo ALIX JR     Mathieu AMALRIC     Santiago AMIGORENA     Aure ATIKA     Jacques AUDIARD     Adam BAKRI     Alec BALDWIN     Dibakar BANERJEE     Olias...

The Festival de Cannes is delighted to offer its followers a different take on the daily action in its "Behind the Lens", section, created last year. In contrast to the more formal approach of the photocalls, press conferences and red carpet, discover special Cannes moments, atmospheres, fleeting glances, asides and, above all, the...

After AI to Makoto, a musical and bloody romance projected in a Midnight Screening in 2012, Takashi Miike, the prolific and iconoclastic filmmaker delivers a "survival" thriller with Wara no Tate (Shield of Straw), presented in Competition. Inspired by Kazuhiro Kiuchi's novel, Wara no Tate recounts the spectacular misfortunes of...

  

From camels to castles, the actress-director continues to mine the intimate, family-based, autobiographical vein for her films. After Actrices (Actresses - Dreams of the Night Before), presented in Un Certain Regard in 2007, she is competing now for the Palme d’or with A Castle in Italy (Un Château en Italie). It is about a family...

She is the only woman to feature on the list of Palme d’or award winners. In 1993, Jane Campion dazzled at Cannes with her spellbindingly romantic film, The Piano. Seven years earlier, she walked away with the Short Films Palme d’or for Peel. It was only natural, therefore, for Gilles Jacob to select this “child of Cannes” to...

For his first film in English, the French actor and director has tackled a remake, on American soil, of a feature film by Jacques Maillot that came out in 2008 and in which he was one of the two leading actors: Blood Ties. Photo from the film © RRFor a long time, Guillaume Canet felt like the making of Blood Ties would never end....

In Conversation Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno), Luchino Visconti joins forces again with Burt Lancaster, the actor who helped bring him success ten years earlier in The Leopard, which garnered him the Palme d’or in 1963.  Two other Visconti films have been presented at the Festival: Boccaccio 70 (1962) and Death in Venice...

The Palestinian filmmaker, Hany Abu-Assad, who most notably directed the film, Paradise Now (2005), features among the line-up of the Cannes Official Selection for the first time. A tale of three childhood friends and a young woman in the occupied territories, Omar is one the first productions to come out of the nascent Palestinian...

As I Lay Dying is the first major film and first Selection at Cannes by actor, producer and scriptwriter James Franco, who first made a name for himself in the role of Harry Osborn, Spider-Man’s nemesis in the Sam Raimi trilogy. Tell us how your film came about. My father recommended As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, when I was...