Cannes 2014 Day 1 Recap: Pink, Yellow and Definitely Blue — Grace of Monaco + Jury Duty

At the Cannes Film Festival we rest on the first day, not the seventh day. Traditionally the first Wednesday of the fest sees an onslaught of two types of travellers: film people that are a. recovering from jet lag or b. landing at the Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur. Opening day festivities include: the opening film (we will get to this in a minute), the presentation of the jury to the media (see my recap below) and the start of the Market screenings (peppered around the town’s handful of movie theatres). It’s an ideal way for journos to catch up on select Sundance and Berlin titles they might have missed. Our Blake Williams and Nicholas Bell (who had to deal with unfortunate upgrade and downgrade badge issues) will be venturing into select titles. The badge system here in Cannes is a complex one — all media organizations including the web, are graded and codified, thus allocating different colored badges that make it rather easy or difficult to gain access to choice items at the fest. We got the rainbow set of three mentioned in the title above.

This year’s opener was the appropriate (depending on who you speak to) biopic on actress Grace Kelly’s time on set and on the French Riviera (here’s our review), and in the evening, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu became the first title to preem out of the Main Comp bag. Tomorrow all sections along the Croisette launch their programmes.

At the 14:30 mark, the jury press conference saw Jury President Jane Campion, Carole Bouquet, Sofia Coppola, Leila Hatami, Jeon Do-yeon (who won in Cannes for her memorable perf in Secret Sunshine), Willem Dafoe, Gael García Bernal, Jia Zhangke, Nicolas Winding Refn, Danish film director field beachball sized inoffensive set of questions, and while we learned that the process is much like what previous juries might have mentioned in the past, we did learn that Campion asked her members to avoid reading press and is set on meeting up to a three times during the fest for a pow wow. I personally liked how Dafoe qualified the process as working with a moving target. Refn was asked about Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut. He’ll definitely be on hand for the world preem event.

Top news items on day (and plenty more)

– Sony Pictures Classics pre-emptively pick up Bonello’s Saint Laurent
– Paramount Pictures bought the North American rights to the Denis Villeneuve’s Story Of Your Life
– Tilda Swinton is joining Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Infinity Engine
– Catherine Keener, Kiernan Shipka, Anton Yelchin, Riley Keough joined Peer Pedersen’s The Greens Are Gone
– Magnolia Pictures picked up Jody Lee Lipes’ Ballet 422
– Screen Media Films picked up Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones
– Magnet Releasing picked up V/H/S: Viral
– Lars von Trier is writing a horror film for Kristian Levring
– Michael Fassbender might be joining Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans
– Cohen Media Group picked up In the Name of My Daughter