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The Blog
There I am, harnessed to a high cliff on the coast of Southern England, wearing a beautiful costume made by Colleen Atwood, three times Oscar winner, listening to directions shouted by Mr Tim Burton (he was all the way down on the shore).
My forearms start to cramp up. I'm poised in an awkward position the middle of a room under the hot beam of a studio light. The scene I'm filming is suddenly tense. The actors stop talking, fold their arms and stare pensively at each other. Total silence descends upon the set, and suddenly I really, really need to burp. Making movies is harder than I imagined. I was on the set of Derby Soap Opera, an ambitious film project orchestrated by Italian director Marinella Senatore. "
There is something about the 1947-49 period of Ealing production that speaks to the renewed and widened sense of purpose that Michael Balcon wrote about in the post-war period. The Loves of Joanna Godden sits confidently alongside other projects.
Best-selling thriller author Lee Child says fans of his fictional hero Jack Reacher should suspend their anger at Tom Cruise having been cast as the tall and strapping man of action. Cruise has been filming the first Reacher movie, One Shot, which is due for release in December and is based on the ninth book in British author Child's hugely successful series of novels.
Despite being one of Hollywood's most legendary and cherished stars, and while Cannes pays tribute to the 50th anniversary of her death, Marilyn Monroe never graced the festival with her presence.
It's Day 10 of Cannes and the annual festival fatigue has well and truly set in. I arrived at the press junket for the new HBO movie Hemingway and Gellhorn to find most of the other journalists there acting like doped up zombies. Even Nicole Kidman tells me how exhausted she is before my interview starts...
Last night was the biggest charity event on the Cannes Calendar and I had bagged one of the most sought after invitations in town. I was off to the amfAR dinner and party. The annual Cinema Against AIDS ball attracts all the A-listers and is a fantastic event for a great cause.
Over the last few months I've reviewed a number of events put together by the people at Secret Cinema - large scale, visual productions carried out ov...
You might think logically that the Cannes film festival is all about films. It's not. It's substantially about brands trying to hawk their names around the festival and ensure that they are associated with the most luxurious event of the year.
I said in my original blog about Cannes to expect the unexpected at the film festival. Well, who would have thought that Ronan Keating would be here for a film and that torrential rain would dampen the spirits of everyone at the festival - including Ronan?
The rain might still be here but there are no damp spirits in Cannes. It could be because Hollywood golden boy Brad Pitt has arrived in town. On the subject of his personal life, he said that Angelina Jolie is not here in Cannes with him as she's prepping for a new role and that rumours of an August wedding are false. "There's no date been set."
One week in and the team are still bearing up... just! We decided to have a night off - which in Cannes meant we watched a film. So we ordered pizzas and sat down to watch iLL Manors - Ben Drew aka Plan B's new film. Maybe not the wisest film choice for a night of switching off/escapism.
Films with black leads and supporting white casts might violate the unconscious expectations of critics. In previous decades the majority of black performers cast in movies were seen in subservient or stereotypical roles. Only in the last 10 years have black artists made progress in the variety of roles available.
With most interviews you're either talking to the actual real-life human being or their alter ego, which is actually more common than you'd think. A lot of A-listers in particular seem to come across like they're acting in interviews and just reciting a script given to them by their publicist. But with the comedy TV host Keith Lemon, I feel like I'm interviewing both him and his creator Leigh Francis and I struggle to understand which person I'm talking to.
In a passionate plea, Alan Partridge once shouted at his confused guests "Stop getting Bond wrong!" Skyfall looks like it's going to fulfil this demand and more besides - so for the 50th anniversary of the martini lover can Mendes manage to pull out the best Bond since Goldeneye?
It's not uncommon to be asked what it's like to work at the Cannes film festival, and I usually reply that "it's really quite exhausting." However, what I'm reminded of today is that it's also completely weird in an insane banana type way.
