CANNES '08 DISPATCH | Voices from the Croisette: Woody Allen, James Gray, and the Dardennes on the Delicate State of Personal Cinema Today

James Gray: Embarassed by the last 30 years of Hollywood movies

Railing against “the big business takeover of the movie industry,” filmmaker James Gray spoke of a system that he says is now very much against the writer-director. “Americans were amazing storytellers,” Gray proclaimed, seated alongside Gwyneth Paltrow at a press conference to discuss his Cannes competition entry, “Two Lovers,” earlier this week. Criticizing recent Hollywod trends that he feel undermine the creative success of past studio success, he said of the movies, “I have very little admiriation for what has been going on in my coutnry for the last 30 years.”

“I think the movie business is very similar to where Detroit auto makers were in the early 1970s,” Gray elaborated, “They think they know the perfect product. If you give somebody McDonalds every day and then you give them sushi on a day after 200 days of Big Mac, their reaction is going to be ‘What is that’?”

But continuing the thought he added that sooner or later, the studios may regret their focus on broader and younger audiences. “When i hear the studios say, ‘Thats not twhat the audience wants’, I want to kill them,” he noted, “I think people are much more open to it than the studios think.”

The Dardenne Brothers with actress Arta Dobroshi at the press conference earlier this week for their new film, “The Silence of Lorna.” Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE.

The Dardenne Brothers: Avoid an auteur ghetto

Last year in Cannes, a heavy hitter roster of international filmmakers pondered the state of international cinema, a topic that came up this week during a conversation with Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, here in competition with their new film, “The Silence of Lorna” (Le Silence de Lorna).

The work of the brothers—hailed in Cannes with two previous Palme d’Or prizes—is part of a broader international cinema that some consider distressed. “We are not pessimistic about what you call the ‘author cinema’,” Jean-Pierre Dardenne told a journalist who questioned them on the matter. “There can be bad ‘author-type cinema that doesn’t have an audience, (but) at the same time we think that this type of cinema does have a future.”

Continuing, Jean-Pierre Dardenne added, “You should not talk about this author type cinema as too difficult or too experiemental…we shouldn’t create a ghetto around it. Perhaps this is rather simplistic, but what I am saying (is that) there are good films and there are bad films, whether they are ‘author-type’ cinema or not.”

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