News From Cannes

Derek Jacobi has launched an attack on the current generation of film-makers for relying too heavily on special effects at the expense of storytelling. Jacobi, at Cannes for the premiere of his new film, Love Is The Devil, in which he plays Francis Bacon, said, "Now that they have discovered effects, they can't let them alone. Even actors won't be needed eventually. They will recreate Marilyn Monroe or Humphrey Bogart. It's really spooky. They're keeping the eye interested rather than engaging the mind and the heart." Meanwhile, director Ken Loach also had his own bugbear - in this case, Lottery funding. His film, My Name Is Joe, is competing for the Palme d'Or and was funded by the National Lottery. He denounced the Lottery as a "tax on the poor," and went on to say that the Labour government are "only interested in what the business community think. He's turned his back on all the Joes in Britain. I think that from the moment that he sat down with Rupert Murdoch we knew." He went on to say that "My Name Is Joe does not portray the optimistic vision of Britain that Tony Blair has been trying to promote abroad. It is a gritty, harrowing tale." He said he was "pleased" that Minister for Culture Chris Smith didn't attend the film's premiere, because, "I don't want to be hijacked into some kind of a Cool Britannia thing," adding that he wouldn't be able to talk to him anyway. Pathe Pictures and mobile phone company Orange have launched the new Pathe Production prize at Cannes. Intended to encourage new writing talent into the movie business, the best entry will be made into a feature film. Much fuss has surrounded the reported bad blood between Hunter S Thompson and Terry Gilliam, whose film, based on Thompson's book Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, debuted at the Festival. Things are apparently so bad between them that there were fears Thompson would fly across to try to disrupt proceedings during the screening. The only reason he didn't go, according to the film's publicist, was because he was unable to find a flight between America and Europe that would let him smoke. Matters came to a head between them recently after Gilliam said in an interview, "I keep saying the guy died around 1974, and the guy that's there is this mummified version of him." Friends of Thompson said the writer was particularly upset that Gilliam - who produced the screenplay in only eight days - did not seem to want any input from him and cut out what he felt were important passages of the book. "I wanted to keep [him] away from the film," Gilliam admitted. "His chaotic behaviour would not work there. That's the only way I could treat him and the book with the disrespect they deserved." Even Johnny Depp, who plays Thompson in the film and who built a close relationship with the writer, admitted to being frightened when Thompson turned up one day on the set. "I wondered how he'd feel seeing me playing him," Depp said. "Hunter is an excellent marksman and has access to numerous weapons."