Cannes Classics: “Never Apologize: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson” by Mike Kaplan

The Cannes Classics program continues tonight with the screening of Never Apologize: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson by Mike Kaplan, which was initiated by Malcolm
McDowell in homage to Lindsay Anderson. For this evening’s showing, president of the Jury, Stephen Frears – who was an assistant on the film If, which won the Palme
d’Or in 1969 – was present as well as many film buffs, including Quentin Tarantino.

Stephen Frears spoke fondly of the director: “I was really quite lucky to be like an apprentice of two great directors, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. I’m really here because
of them. They were two of the men who changed British cinema. In the late 50s, they started to make films about the working class, and in Lindsay’s case, surrealist films. In 1968 I
worked on If, and then Malcolm got cast in it. Lindsay was the most extraordinary man and a huge rebellious person in British cinema, iconoclastic, very well educated, very
clever, funny and ironic.”

“The Edinburgh Festival asked if I would be present for the retrospective of Lindsay Anderson, to be in the following year,” Malcolm McDowell explained how the project came
to be. “And I said, ‘I’ll do better than that, I’ll do a show about him’…and very soon it was six weeks before the opening night. And I called my dear
friend here Mike Kaplan to help out. We had all this archive stuff. I was amazed; I had so much fun going through the archives.”

“It started at Malcolm’s dining room table. To be here in Cannes, the temple of cinema, it’s really a fairy tale. We are all thrilled to be here in a place that Lindsay
loved more than anyplace else – all of his major films premiered here and he was a critic here,” added Mike Kaplan, director of the film paying tribute.

Photo copyright AFP