Words: Tom Ward
Running from May 16th to 27th, the crème de la crème of the world’s filmmaking talent are soon to descend on the French Riviera to celebrate the biggest, best and erm, most innovative flicks set for release this year. Along the movies set to be screened are: Wes Anderson’s starry Asteroid City, Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, the final Indiana Jones film, and Alice Rohrwacher’s anticipated black market drama La Chimera. All of which sounds like a good time.
But, writer’s strike aside, with Hugh Grant recently lamenting the fact that actors no longer get drunk and fall in love with each other on film sets any more, it might not be a particularly thrilling fortnight in the sun. Post Me Too, the film industry is finally, and thankfully, behaving itself. But, at Cannes, booing and bad behaviour is almost a right of passage, dating back to actress Simone Silva’s decision to go topless at a photoshoot in 1954. From actors threatening to assault festival bosses with baseball bats to far right sympathies, walkouts and more genitals than you can shake a stick at here are the festival’s most controversial moments.
Note, the following is not for the squeamish…
Taxi Driver Gets Panned, 1976
Like any filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has had his hits and his misses. Fifty years on, we can probably all agree that his tale of a disenfranchised loner is the former and, in the age of the incel, still has a lot to say about society. In 1976 De Niro’s Travis Bickle was too much for audiences drawing boos from the crowd and walkouts following its ultra-violent ending.
“The whole issue about the violence in the movie kind of exploded. Marty, Bobby and Harvey kind of got stuck at the Hotel du Cap and didn’t come out very much,” recalls Jodie Foster who starred in the film and was a teenager at the time.
Still, good triumphed in the end and the film ended up winning the festival’s highest honour, the Palme d’Or.
Spike Lee Wields A Bat, 1989
Spike Lee has been cranking out classics for decades. Sure, you might not have seen all of them, but 1989’s Do The Right Thing arguably remains the crown jewel of his filmography. Controversially, it missed out on the Palme d’Or in that year’s competition.
Lee blamed jury president Wim Wenders for the loss after Wenders said he felt Lee’s character of Mookie was ‘unheroic’. Lee threatened to wait in an alley for Wenders with a baseball bat. Luckily, they didn’t end up coming to blows.
Chloë Sevigny Performs Oral Sex, 2003
This isn’t a case of did-they didnt-they when it comes to two actors rumoured to have done the deed IRL on a film set. In Vincent Gallo’s experimental road movie The Brown Bunny, counter culture icon Chloë Sevigny performs real fellatio, directly in front of the camera. Sevigny and Gallo were dating at the time, and claimed the scene had its place in pursuit of art.
Naturally, there was outrage and walkouts, intensified by Gallo’s feud with legendary late film critic Roger Ebert who called the movie the worst film in the history of Cannes.
Horrible Mutilation, 2009
From oral sex to something altogether more gruesome. In 2009 controversial Belgian director Lars Von Trier debuted Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe. Lots of nasty things happen in the film. The most shocking is Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character cutting off her genitals. Yes, you read that right. Cue walkouts, and even fainting.
Sympathy For Hitler, 2011
Lars Von Trier was seemingly on a role in the 2010s. Debuting Melancholia (starring a fantastic Kirsten Dunst) in 2011, Von Trier seemingly out of nowhere told a press conference “I understand Hitler… He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit”.
To paraphrase the title of his previous film “Jesus H Christ!”. Naturally, Von Trier was declared ‘persona non-grata’ by festival authorities immediately after his remarks.
Uma Thurman Bares All, 2011
There must have been something in the water in 2011. During the opening ceremony, Uma Thurman decided to mimic the “leg crossing” scene of Sharon Stone’s Basic Instincts in which she flashes her genitalia. A brave look, but a bit more than festival organisers were looking for.
McConaughey Is Booed, 2015
At a time when Matthew McConaughey was white hot following career-resuscitating turns in Dallas Buyer’s Club and True Detective, his 2015 collaboration with Gus Van Sant, Sea of Trees, felt like a sure thing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, with US audiences failing to connect with the film about Japan’s infamous ‘Suicide Forest’. The film was booed, but McConaughey put a brave face on it, telling press, “I’m happy to be here…I’m happy that the film got in. It was a great experience for me.”
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