The Rite of Passage at Cannes

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/movies/james-gray-makes-his-way-on-the-cannes-star-circuit.html

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CANNES, France — As he stood here after the premiere of his new movie, “The Immigrant,” James Gray smiled widely. It had been five years since he had been to the Cannes Film Festival with “Two Lovers,” which was also the last time he had directed a movie. Flanked by Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Renner, two of the stars from his latest, Mr. Gray, 44, looked content for a man who earlier that day had compared facing the journalist hordes to having a colonoscopy without anesthesia. But the hordes had been dispatched and now he could bask in an audience’s love. So he smiled, hugged Ms. Cotillard and then, abruptly, buried his face in his blue bespoke tuxedo jacket.

“The Immigrant,” a moody melodrama set in New York in 1921, turns on a triangle involving a new Polish arrival (Ms. Cotillard), a magician (Mr. Renner) and a pimp (Joaquin Phoenix, who’s off shooting another film). The movie represents Mr. Gray’s fourth time in competition here, a notable distinction given that he has directed just five features. He was first invited to Cannes in 2000 for his second, “The Yards” (his first is the 1994 drama “Little Odessa”), and returned to face clashing waves of cheers and jeers in 2007 for “We Own the Night” and again in 2008 for “Two Lovers.” The reception in the United States for those last two films was divided, but Le Monde capped its rave for “We Own the Night” by declaring Mr. Gray “one of the great American directors of our time.”

For Mr. Gray, Cannes offers the kind of institutional legitimation he has not often received in the United States. He has never been nominated for an Academy Award, and while he’s been up for Spirit Awards, the Indiewood version of the Oscars, he hasn’t won any of those, either. At Cannes he is not simply another director, he is one of this festival’s chosen auteurs as well as a celebrity in his own right. It’s a role that the tall, talky Mr. Gray wears comfortably, although his tendency to sprinkle conversations with funny, self-mocking comments suggests he doesn’t want to be taken too seriously. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from his movies, but he’s a comedian: Kent Jones, a programmer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, calls him one of the funniest people he knows.

As he sat Friday morning outside his hotel in a car that would take him off for what would be a very a long day and night — perhaps longer because I was tagging after him to write about what it’s like for a director to have a movie at Cannes — a woman insistently knocked on a window, calling out his name and asking for his autograph.

He rolled down the window and scribbled his name on an advertising image for “Two Lovers.” After some logistics the motorcade that was also ferrying him and other members of his group drove the half-mile or so to the Palais des Festivals, the event’s headquarters. Delivered to the rear, he got out to face dozens of photographers and civilians calling out “James! James!”

He signed some autographs before the crowd’s attention shifted first to Mr. Renner and then Ms. Cotillard, each arriving in separate cars with their own handlers. Surrounded by representatives from the movie’s French sales company and other minders and fussers, including a man with a Tumi suitcase filled with makeup, the team floated up some stairs to an outdoor area for the Cannes ritual known as the photo call.

Cannes is exceedingly insistent on what it calls protocol, rituals that everyone from stars to journalists must follow. For the press that means wearing festival badges that are visible at all times to the guards who check attendees into the Palais (and also search bags, confiscate water bottles and wand viewers with metal detectors). For stars protocol means official dinners, endless photographs, dozens of interviews and a walk down the red carpet for a kind of stations of the Cannes Film Festival cross. At the photo call Mr. Gray, Ms. Cotillard and Mr. Renner posed separately and together under a white canopy as photographers and television crews screamed out their names. When Ms. Cotillard’s eyes began to water from the wind and she put on her sunglasses, she was greeted with catcalls.

From there the three stopped under another canopy for a brief official festival television interview. Mr. Gray’s wife, Alexandra, and the couple’s three young children were milling about by then and they joined him as he and the group headed into the Palais. Once inside, he and the others again stopped and smiled for a mob of shouting photographers huddled outside the room in which daily postscreening news conferences take place. By then a publicist had e-mailed Mr. Gray to give him a sense of how “The Immigrant” had played at its first press screening, at 8:30 a.m. The e-mail, he said several hours later at the after-party, read: “People clapped. I think it went well. No boos.” Mr. Gray laughed. “No boos — talk about a low bar.”

The news conference questions were polite, fawning and largely directed at Mr. Gray, and over in about a half-hour. Afterward he did more than 20 one-on-one interviews and, before a rushed dinner, had a final fitting for his tuxedo, which had been made for him free by a Savile Row tailor. (“Here’s the thing,” Mr. Gray said. “When you make a film for scale and the actors work for scale and you haven’t made a picture in five years — give me the free tux.”) By 6 p.m. everyone was at the Carlton Hotel waiting to be driven to the premiere, while festivalgoers like Laura Dern, here with her father, Bruce, one of the stars of another competition film, “Nebraska,” drifted in the hall.

The motorcade of 15 cars inched to the Palais, accompanied by armed members of the national police. Security at the festival is intense, borderline frenzied, and while the guards checking attendees into the Palais are decidedly nicer than they were a few years ago, along the red carpet the unsmiling men wearing earpieces and grimaces only accentuate the militaristic vibe of the experience. The far larger, more heavily guarded Academy Awards are almost laid-back Californian by comparison. Then again, given the thousands of people who swarm locustlike around the red carpet at Cannes — and considering that this year a man fired off a pistol near where Christoph Waltz and Daniel Auteuil were being interviewed — all the heavy muscle is also understandable.

Mr. Gray’s walk on the red carpet was pleasantly routine — at once hectic and controlled, amusing and bizarre. The dress code for the red carpet is mandatory black tie and most women wear dresses or skirts, with the men in tuxedos. (I wore pants and was sharply asked by two guards if I belonged with the team.) Once again, he, Ms. Cotillard, Mr. Renner and a handful of crew members posed for several hundred photographers and then, arm in arm, they stood at the foot of the Palais stairs leading to the Grand Théâtre Lumière and looked up. There, midway up, Thierry Frémaux, the main programmer, and Gilles Jacob, the festival president, stood in their black tuxedos. The entire arrangement — the shouting throngs, the slow ceremonial march on the carpet, the bowing and scraping, the troops of guards and the solemnly waiting dignitaries standing above their visitors — was somehow vaguely reminiscent of a scene out of an old Hollywood studio picture about ancient Rome.

Once inside, everyone settled into the 2,400-seat theater to watch “The Immigrant” with one exception: Mr. Gray. “I left about halfway through,” he said at the after-party, “because I hear every cough, I see everybody shift in their seats and it becomes agonizing.” He went out to a balcony and then walked alone on the Croisette, the teeming promenade by the sea. The walk offered, he said, “no relief at all because people kept stopping me and asking to take my picture, which was kind of cool when I didn’t have a movie playing. But at that moment I was just dissembling.” He returned to the theater and, on a signal from the festival coordinators, slipped back into his seat right before the movie ended and the audience rose to its feet to applaud.