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Cannes Snaps
NA HONG JIN (The The Wailing Wailing, out of competition competition))
Na Hong Jin THE DISRUPTORS Nicholas Hamilton, Samantha Isler, Charlie Shotwell, Viggo Mortensen, Shree Crooks and Annalise Basso greet the press at the Captain Fantastic photocall in Cannes Hubert Boesl
Sevigny’s animal attraction Never work with animals or children is an oft-quoted adage in the film industry, and debut director Chloe Sevigny used to be a believer. Speaking to Screen International ahead of the premiere of her short film Kitty — which is
one of three shorts closing Critics’ Week on May 20 — Sevigny recounted the challenges of working with feline movie stars. “They are very expensive and you can never work with just one — we had two older cats and three kittens to rely on,” she says.
During filming, the production had a trainer who provides a range of ‘star cats’. “She trained them for weeks in advance, we were so frightened how they might perform,” Sevigny recalls. Her fears were quickly allayed. “They turned up and they really churned it out.” Tiffany Pritchard
#CannesChatter Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Siddiqui’s lucky number seven
@gregwilliamsphotography#madsmikkelsen and #CliveOwen at the @finchandpartners @jaegerlecoultre film makers dinner at the @hotelducapedenroc yesterday @festivaldecannes #gregwilliams #artofbehindthescenes #gregwilliamsphotography #leicaQ (Pictured) Clive Owen and Mads Mikkelsen share a joke at a Cannes festival dinner
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Korean director Na Hong Jin (The Yellow Sea, The Chaser) is back in Cannes for the third time with the supernatural mystery thriller The Wailing (Gokseong), starring Kwak Do-won as a police officer trying to save his daughter from homicidal possession. Released locally on May 12, the film has clocked up more than 2.3 million admissions at the box office. The film has its international premiere out of competition in Cannes today. The cast also features Hwang Jung-min. How did you come up with the idea for The Wailing? After The Yellow Sea, I lost two people very close to me and went to their funerals. It was the first time I lost anyone so dear to me. I was very sad and cried a lot. And that’s what got me thinking about being in the position of a victim and focusing on that.
Are you interested in the occult? Not especially, but I was curious about this different culture and wanted to explore its presence in daily life. Of course there are the old films everybody knows, made by great directors — like The Exorcist, The Shining, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby — that I like and was no doubt influenced by. They’re like textbooks. But there hasn’t been much that’s been impressive since. It seemed mostly like repetition. It’s necessary to go back to them, but I wanted to put an Eastern and Korean twist on the canon. Why set the film in the town of Gokseong? It’s my grandmother’s home town and I spent a lot of time there when I was young. Gokseong is a place where Catholics who were persecuted in the North were smuggled down to, and finally were martyred there. Jean Noh
Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who stars in Directors’ Fortnight selection Raman Raghav 2.0, has become something of a Cannes regular. The Indian actor has had seven films to date at the festival, including Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, which premiered in Critics’ Week in 2013. “The film-makers who work with me say I’m a lucky charm for Cannes, I’m very proud of that,” says the actor. He is now looking to increase his presence in Western films, and has a small role in Dev Patel and Rooney Mara-starrer Lion, which filmed earlier this year. Tom Grater
May 18, 2016 Screen International at Cannes 7