Joseph Kosinski and more on their top festival moments – The Hollywood Reporter

Joseph Kosinsky
The Top Gun: Maverick director of a gala dinner — including a flight by the French air force — in 2022. This year, he returns as executive producer of BMW Films’ calm presents an all-electric BMW i7 starring Uma Thurman and Pom Klementieff

The whole Cannes experience — photographers on both sides of the carpet and people shouting at you and being there with our entire cast and for us to be together, especially after the pandemic, because the movie was made before — just surreal.

This was my first visit to Cannes and it will be something I will never forget. And with flyovers, remember I had planes flying overhead about two years ago, so that’s not the weird part. Flying over is something I’m used to, but it was great to see the French Air Force and the colors of the French flags.

And [the screening] really special, because it started with a tribute to Tom and then he was awarded the Palme d’Or, then we watched the movie and I sat next to him the whole time. So to see his career, to be sitting next to him is quite bizarre, then to watch the movie and see him punch me in the arm with excitement the whole thing… that’s what I’m going to do. never forget.

It’s a once in a lifetime experience. So yes, it will be fun to experience it in a different way this year.

Cristian Mungiu
Romanian filmmaker won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days

It was my first time competing, so I was told that I could participate on the first or last day. We decided to do it on day one, thinking that from the start we would beat them hard and make an impression, even if people would forget the movie two days later. But after two days, people are still talking about the movie. I was asked to stay one day and another. I could hear people talking about the movie on the street, at parties. I gave the interview after the interview. We started to hope we could win something.

Then there were the awards, and the festival asked me to stay. At the ceremony, it looked like we could win the Palme d’Or. I was so stressed out! The stakes were too high, I had a terrible headache. When they said my name, I was completely dumbfounded. I was on stage but I missed the whole moment – I was just trying to concentrate, to say something smart and not behave like a monkey.

Looking back, it doesn’t seem like it was an accident. There’s something about that movie. Even today, it’s still so fresh, that it changed perspective at the time a bit. It’s the hardest thing in cinema. You can make a great movie, but especially the more experienced you get, the more you lose your original innocence and freshness. I don’t know if you can learn to touch it again. It’s about a phase in your life like anything else.

I’m glad the movie was a success. You can read a lot of books about communism, but the feeling of living through it, the feeling that people are watching you – that’s more fun for young people to experience than just reading about it.

Paul Laverty
Longtime writer by Ken Loach, at this year’s 11th festival with old oak treeReflections on a trip to Cannes in 2012

We were out there doing Sharing of angels (in 2012), and we had a wonderful boy with us, Gary Maitland, who was in a few of our films – he was also in Sweet sixteen.

But his real job is in the Glasgow Cleaning Room, [better known as] the Clenny. He is a bin man. In fact, there’s a great photo of him taking out the trash with a bus behind and it has a big ad for it. Sharing of angels up there.

But we were in Cannes for one night and the next day he would be back to work. And we were looking out over the water, and he took a glass of champagne, pulled it up, and said, “From Cannes to Clenny.” And he hit it back.

From Cannes to Clenny! That’s the best saying I’ve ever heard.

Warwick Thornton
Indigenous Australian director, returns to Cannes this year with New Adultwhen he won the 2009 Caméra d’Or for Samson & Delila

When I first directed at Cannes, they literally rounded up all of our newcomers and put us in a room and they really delved into us about the importance of this opportunity. .

Because you can compete for the Palme d’Or 20 times, but you only get to be at the Caméra d’Or with your first film once. So it really added to the pressure we felt when we attended Cannes with our first production, but it also made things more interesting. And it created a great relationship between all of our new directors, because we were all in it together.

Back to New Adult In Un Certain Regard this time, I don’t have that crazy pressure anymore. I can just be part of the conversation and I’m there to play. Now it’s like, “Hi, people, look at this beautiful thing we did.”

James Marsh
director of Theory of everything and an Oscar winner for man on rope reflects on the emotional roller coaster ride that was his first trip to the festival (the one that would eventually lead to his Academy Awards).

I was here in 2005 with Kingin Uncertainty — a very low-budget American film with Gael Garcia Bernal.

You get a call from Cannes and it’s like, oh, this isn’t even in your wildest imagination — they’re going to show your film in the official part of the festival. So you’re in Cannes, you’re at the premiere of your film, and it’s obviously a huge hit. I guess most of them are – there is some kind of goodwill factor. You get a warm welcome. So it all adds up and you think this is like the best night of my life. Now I’m a filmmaker.

And then the next morning I had to go somewhere to do journalism. And I approached the journalist who was shuffling these magazines behind her back. She looks really worried. So I read the reviews, and they are the worst reviews that can be written – terrible, terrible, evil. Literally, I was going from my greatest dream come true to being destroyed… from the pinnacle of achievement to the bottom of despair and self-loathing… and in a matter of hours.

I can’t make any feature films. I can not do anything. So I was forced to go back to the documentary and make it man on rope. So there was a happy ending.