Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

Cannes: Days Nine & Ten

It's official. This year's Cannes Film Festival is winding down. One by one, journalists seem to be headed for the airport in Nice. Standing in line at the panini cart only took 15 minutes instead of the bare minimum of 30 minutes. Even the security officers that guard the Palais from intruders have been recognizing me lately and their frisks have been less than half-hearted. (Not that I'm complaining mind you).

On Thursday evening the festival invited Wim Wenders back for like the gillionth time. (Okay it was only his 13th time at the festival with a film and 14th if you count his 1989 presidency of the festival's jury). Wenders turned up with Don't Come Knocking, a film written by and starring Sam Shepard. The last time the two worked together on a project they churned out Paris, Texas, which took home the Palm d'Or in 1984. This time, Wenders was ecstatic that Shepard agreed to act in the film as well. "To have Sam in front of the camera is one of my oldest desires as a filmmaker."

Don't Come Knocking tells the story of Howard Spence, a middle-aged movie actor who has seen better days. Spence, drunk and stoned, deserts the set of his latest western and takes off to see his mother who he hasn't seen in 30 years. She informs him that decades earlier a woman had called claiming to have given birth to Spence's son. Seeing this as some hope for his life, Spence takes off for Butte, Montana where he plans to track down his ex flame and possibly his son. Finding Doreen (Jessica Lange) is easy, as she still works in the same bar. Unfortunately, his son Earl (Gabriel Mann), wants nothing to do with him. There are more twists to come.

Don't Come Knocking is a character driven piece, typical of Shepard's work. American journalists seemed to be split over the film, with most calling it mediocre. It was the foreign journalists that were head over heals for the film, cheering and applauding it at length after the press screening and actually calling out in loud whoops when Wenders and Shepard an early afternoon press conference. Maybe I was just too tired to see the genius of the movie. It had good writing and great cinematography, and T.Bone Burnett did the music. But ultimately the movie didn't really move me the way I hoped it would.

Wenders, naturally, tended to agree with the foreign journalists. He is very proud of the film. "When we were shooting it I felt we were doing something right," he confessed. "And then when T.Bone edited the music I knew that we were doing something very right. Certainly it's one of the best things I've done in my life."

The filmmaker gives most of the credit to Shepard and his script, claiming it allowed him to sleep well as a director. "Most of the films I have done, I have slept badly, because I realized I still had a lot to do for the following morning," Wenders explained. "With Sam's script I always went to bed and slept like a log because I knew I just had to go do my work and not fuck it up."

Shepard's reputation as a an award winning playwright often proceed him on a project and can often be overwhelming, as Sarah Polley, who plays Spence's illegitimate daughter, pointed out, "The only thing that is difficult is its extremely intimidating knowing that you are the first person to actually say this Sam Shepard line and if you screw it up you will be ashamed of yourself for the rest of your life."

Shepard himself couldn't really put a finger on what audiences like about his writing, but figures it's the concentration on character, rather than plotline. "Those are after the fact and they are interesting but they are not questions that you entertain while you are trying to do the practical work of screenwriting which has to do mainly for me with character and situation and keeping it somewhat believable," Shepard said.

Journalists throughout the day could be overheard discussing Don't Come Knocking's chances of winning a Palm d'Or. Many think it's got a good shot, reasoning that it might be a movie the jury could easily agree upon.

On Friday the festival premiered a film that surprised everyone, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Most everyone in Cannes was counting on the directorial debut of Tommy Lee Jones to be bad (including yours truly). An advance screening of the film for selected journalists on Wednesday evening created instant positive buzz and the official press screening was jam packed.

Jones not only directs the film, but also plays the lead role of Pete Perkins, a Texas rancher whose best friend, Melquiades Estrada, turns up shot dead and half-buried in the desert. Local law enforcement in the border community don't seem to want to investigate, so they just bury Estrades in a community grave yard. This infuriates Perkins, who manages to kidnap a Border Patrol officer, forcing him to dig up Estrada and accompany him on horseback into Mexico, where he hopes to return the body to his family.

Sounds kind of like a western doesn't it? I can assure you, it looks like a western. So if it sounds like a western and looks like a western it's a western. . . right? Not according to Jones.

"The term has become pejorative, if not an epithet," Jones said of the genre. "I don't know why it would apply to our movie. Maybe it's because we have some horses and big hats. It's a movie about a culture, a country, that has a border that's sometimes palpable and sometimes not."

It also has two actors riding horses for more than half the movie through the West Texas/Mexico desert. Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga felt the landscape was one of the characters in the film and bristled at the idea that Three Burials was about vigilante justice. "This is a film of friendship where a friend has to fulfill a promise to this dead friend," Arriaga argued. "This is a journey of knowledge. This is a journey of redemption. This is a journey of the ultimate friendship."

Jones, who is known to have an antagonistic relationship with the press, was actually quite congenial. . . at least for what we've come to expect of him. I guess that's what happens when you have a movie you've got to sell. Not like when you're just an actor and can leave that in the hands of producers and directors. So, feeling somewhat safer than I normally would around Jones I just had to ask him about the Camera d'Or.

You see, as a first time director Jones was eligible to receive the award reserved for filmmakers presenting their debuts at the festival or one of its side bars. The only problem was Jones isn't a first time director. He made a television movie ten years ago. Thus he was disqualified, along with two other filmmakers, earlier in the festival. Producer Michael Fitzgerald said that Cannes officials already knew Jones had a previous directing credit because he told them so himself. The rumors that Jones was livid and had his lawyers help disqualify the two other filmmakers was completely "preposterous".

And with that, I'm headed for the airport in Nice. No more paninis. The next security officer is see will want to see if I have a sharp instrument other than my pen. Je vais de nouveau à Los Angeles. C'a été amusement

Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five & Six
Day Seven & Eight

May 20, 2005
- by J. Sperling Reich