The flight from Nice to London was packed on Thursday with denizens from the festival. But the plane was late. As the flight neared landing, an attendant was seen hurrying two pressed-for-time passengers to the back of the plane, where they could be offloaded in a hurry.

Bad luck for Bob Weinstein and his colleague, the passengers in question. The plane didn’t have a rear exit. And after landing, the doors didn’t open, it seemed, forever, leaving the mogul to stew in the back of the cabin while the minutes to his next plane ticked by, instead of in the front of the line, where he’s more accustomed to stand.

But Bob Weinstein is not the type of person to let a little thing like a sealed door and people standing end-to-end in the corridor stop him.

As he attempted to re-wend his way to the front of the plane, Weinstein finally was forced to wait, and found himself confronted by a needy lady passenger. Could he pass her her carry-on bag? The mogul did so, muttering, “That’ll be ten bucks.” Pause. “I’m from New York. Nothing’s for free.”

Stuck in the aisle for another 10 minutes, the Samaritan act seemed to catch Weinstein off guard. “That’s the first nice thing I’ve done for anybody in years,” he said, as flight attendants finally whisked him off the jet and into a private car waiting on the tarmac, taking him in his customary style.

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You had to get up pretty early to score a spot at the very first screening of “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s new revenge fantasy set during World War II.

Thousands of journalists mobbed the Palais de Festival, and even Harvey Weinstein himself was seen running frantically from one entrance to another as guards told him non, monsieur, the room was ‘complet.’

I made it into the overflow screening room for more than two and a half hours of what was, for me, pure pleasure. Tarantino, who spent something like eight years wrestling with this script,  has found himself in a newly mature space, without losing an ounce of the filmmaking joy that infuses his very best work.

It could be that I’ve been seduced by the cinephilic atmosphere, but it was hard to miss Tarantino’s skilled embrace of the elements that make theatrical moviegoing just plain great: scenes filled with dramatic tension, performances with depth and humor, rich and witty scoring choices, multi-lingual dialogue that Tarantino still stamps as his own, and knowing nods at cinematic history and the power of the medium he loves so well.

The trailer shortchanges the story as being about a group of Jewish soldiers sent behind the lines in Nazi-occupied France to extract brutal revenge. That is only part of it: Brad Pitt leads this group of “bastards” (Eli Roth, Til Schweiger) to scare the Nazis with their acts of vengeance.

But the story is equally that of a Jewish cinema-owner hiding in plain sight in Paris (Shosana, played by Martine Laurent), and her date with destiny in confronting the terrifying intelligence of SS officer Hans Landa, who murdered her family.

Pitt, back in stupid-southerner caricature as Aldo, is probably the least interesting person on the screen. Instead it is Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, an unknown to American audiences, who grabs the screen and walks off with the movie in one of the very best villainous portrayals in years. (My personal favorite screen Nazi is probably Ralph Fiennes in “Schindler’s List”; but Landa just earned a top spot too.)

At the press conference following the screening, where much of the multi-national cast joined Tarantino carrying glasses of champagne, the director said that he came close to pushing off production of the film because they couldn’t find the right actor to play Landa.

“At a certain point I didn’t think I’d find the right actor,” he said. “I realized that the character was pretty special. And I knew whoever I chose had to be as good in languages as Hans Landa, otherwise he couldn’t play the role.”

It came down to the wire in a week when the money to shoot the movie was meant to be closed. “I called (Lawrence Bender) on Monday and said if we didn’t find Landa, I don’t have a film. Lawrence said, ‘Cool.’”

That same week Waltz came in to audition. After two sentences, the director and producer caught one another’s eyes across the room, and Tarantino said: “We’re making the movie,” he recounted.

At that, Waltz got up and planted a kiss on Tarantino in mid-conference.

That’s the way the director is with actors. “I love them from a God perspective,” said Tarantino. “Because to them, I’m God.”

Tarantino was never one for modesty, and why should he be?

As Brad Pitt says in the very last frame of the film, looking straight into the camera after a gruesome, signature task: “This might be my masterpiece.”

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More acquisitions announced on Wednesday:

The Weinstein Company bought two films, "The Fighter," to be directed by David O. Russell, and a comedy, "A Matter of Size."

Here's part of the announcement:

"The Weinstein Company (TWC) has acquired from Relativity Media all international rights to The Fighter...The film, which is currently in pre-production, was written by Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, with most recent script drafts by Scott Silver and Lewis Colick.  David O. Russell will direct, and Academy Award nominee Mark Wahlberg  and Christian Bale will star.

"As a welterweight from the wrong side of the tracks, The Fighter tells the story of Dickie Eklund (Bale), the pride of working class Lowell, Massachusetts.  Living in his shadow is his half-brother and sparring partner Micky Ward (Wahlberg)."

And IFC announced it had acquired the Ken Loach fable, "Looking for Eric," a charming film about a middle-aged British postman, visited in his imagination by the Manchester United soccer star, Eric Cantona, and one of the most controversial films at the festival, Lars von Trier's "Antichrist."

From the announcement:

"The movie has been one of the most warmly received films at this year's event and screened to a massive standing ovation and outbreak of cheers following its official showing on Monday night.  Loach directed the film with his regular team including writer Paul Laverty and producer Rebecca O'Brien.  It was executive produced by the legendary Manchester United superstar Eric Cantona along with Why Not Production's Pascal Caucheteaux and Wild Bunch's Vincent Maraval.  Cantona also stars in the film with Steve Evets, John Henshaw, Stephanie Bishop and Lucy-Jo Hudson.  Cantona’s original idea sparked the idea for the film and Laverty's script."
 

You could have heard a pin drop in the press room as Penelope Cruz recounted the performance of a sex scene in her new movie, “Broken Embraces,” (Los Abrazos Rotos)  directed by the man who helped launch her career, Pedro Almodovar.

In the scene Cruz, playing Lena, a B actress, has sex with her elderly husband while yearning for her lover, a film director. It takes place entirely under a set of white sheets, and when it’s done, Cruz goes to the bathroom to throw up, and comes back to find her husband playing dead.

Wearing a draped beige, strapless sheath at 10 am, she told a packed press room at Cannes on Tuesday that Almodovar – who first introduced her to the wider world in films including in “Live Flesh” in 1997 and “All About my Mother” in 1999 – rewrote the scene on the day of the shoot.

“When I arrived they said, ‘Pedro is out on the street, writing. Don’t talk to him.’ We were all waiting. He came back with an energy I’ll never forget,” she said in English. He then told the crew the scene. “Everybody was blown away. I got very emotional that day from peoples’ reactions.”

While the sex scene was being shot, she said, Almodovar kept speaking aloud the thoughts of her character. “I’ve never seen a love scene shot that way,” she said. “That day I thought I was going to pass out.”

The film is connected to Almodovar’s first iconic hit, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (which is being shot as a TV pilot for Fox, and being prepared as a Broadway musical, he said). Within the movie, Cruz’s character, Lena, is performing in “Women on the Verge.” The new film, though, is a drama about the complex relationships between the film director and the women in his life.

“I felt surrounded by ghosts of all these women I worked with 20 years ago,” Almodovar said about shooting “Embraces.”

Almodovar is one of the very few directors who focuses on women characters, understands them and sees the world from their perspective.

“This time there is much more equality between the characters than in my other films,” the director said. “But my male characters intimidate me. My female characters are stronger, more solid, more robust. They’re inexpendable, whereas the male characters are weaker, darker.”

It was ever thus in Almodovar’s career. And he demonstrated how much he throws himself into helping his actors embrace their roles. “I have a fantastic agreement with all my actors. They allow the movie to touch intimate topics, things that are very painful. And if necessary I play all the parts on the set,” he said. “In fact I’m very shy. But I prefer to demonstrate all the parts. On my first film I performed cunninlingus on an actress, to show the actor who he was supposed to play the role.

Cannes is always full of surprises.

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Meanwhile, IFC Films announced that it had bought the domestic rights in North America to "Ricky," by Francois Ozon ('Swimming Pool,' '8 Women').

The announcement read: 

"Adapted from the short story "Moth" by the English novelist Rose Tremain, Ricky is a fantastical thriller about a unique little boy and the struggles of a working-class single parent in contemporary France.  Ricky premiered in competition at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival.  The film stars Alexandra Lamy (The Ant Bully) and Sergi Lopez (Pan’s Labyrinth) and was produced by Chris Bolzli, Claudie Ossard and Vieri Razzini ."

On the other acquisition front, Sony Pictures Classics was said to be circling  "Looking for Eric," the Ken Loach comedy, and "A Prophet," the two and a half hour French gang-crime thriller that has been the hottest film at the festival. The latter is directed by Jacques Audiard.

 The crowd cheered and clapped at 10 in the morning on Monday for a feel-good film from one of the most earnest and unflinching directors on the block, Ken Loach.

The cerebral, diminutive Loach often makes his films in the world of the British working class. He likes to focus on the forgotten man, the broken spirit, the individual lost in the harsh demands of modern society, from “Raining Stones,” to “My Name is Joe,” to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” about two brothers in Ireland.

But “Looking for Eric” is full of laughs and bittersweet humor. (And this, after “Brokeback” director Ang Lee let down his hair with “Taking Woodstock.” What’s going on here?)

It is the flip side of Loach’s examination of the human condition at its most downtrodden. Eric (Steve Evets) is a postman deep in the throes of midlife breakdown. And he turns to his hero, soccer star Eric Cantona, to guide him through a thicket of personal crisis.

Cantona plays himself in the film as the other Eric’s alter ego, who counsels the postman about reconnecting with a wife he abandoned three decades previously, two stepsons in trouble with the law and his apparent panic attacks.

The film has touching moments of warmth and charm, such as when Eric’s mates from the post office sit around in a self-run group therapy session and try to imagine being seen through the eyes of someone great. (Eric picks Cantona, of course. Another picks Sammy Davis Jr. Who can only see them through one eye, of course.)

And Cantona does a fine job of puncturing his own peacock stereotype as a star for Manchester United in the 1990s. “I am not a man,” he tells Eric the postman at one point. “I am Cantona.”

At the press conference after the screening, the now-retired soccer star said, “I have great pleasure shooting films. Whether I’m a good actor or not is for others to judg …. Ken is always finding new methods for his actors, and he’s very humble as well. He got me to give every bit of myself.” 

Loach said the film taught a lesson about teamwork. “For 30 years society has been telling us we’re individuals, we must succeed alone, when in fact we need one another to succeed,” he said. “The best things we do, we do as a team, as a collective.

The film does not have U.S. distribution, but after today’s reception – it might.

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Israeli films are enjoying a renaissance not seen since – well, perhaps ever.

There are two Israeli films in the out of competition selection at the festival this year, including Haim Tabakman’s “Eyes Wide Open,” a gay love story set in the heart of the ultra-orthodox community; and “Jaffa,” which screened over the weekend to an enthusiastic reception, a love story between an Israeli woman, Mali, and a Palestinian man, Toufik, in the bicultural city on the sea. (Director Karen Yedaya pictured below)

Other acclaimed Israeli films, like last year’s “Waltz With Bashir,” “The Band’s Visit” or “Late Marriage,” have all been made possible by a 2001 Israeli law that has revolutionized the Israeli film industry by providing seed funding for productions from a state-funded nonprofit committee.

“Until January 2001 we were just floating. Israeli cinema was always the bad stepchild in our culture,” said Katriel Schory, the executive director of the Israel Film Fund, which provides the seed funding. “With a small investment, filmmakers can go out and find the rest of the money from private sources. Without this, without public money, there is no cinema.”

The fund has a comparatively miniscule budget: $6 million. But it’s enough to have fundamentally changed the landscape for filmmakers. The fund provides up to $500,000 per project, and grants a piece of equity in every project to the filmmaker.

The results have been remarkable. 

In 1998, Israel’s lowest point for box office share, only .3 percent of movie tickets sold were for Israeli films.

Since 2004, three years after the start of the fund -- which included a marketing budget to encourage Israelis to go see Israeli films -- that statistic rose to 14 percent of the annual tickets sold. It is now higher than that, something like 1.9 million out of  10 million tickets sold annually.

The fund’s slogan? “Give us another chance.”

Director Martin Scorsese’s love of film has found a new outlet for audiences, with the announcement Friday that two digital companies will promote and exhibit a slate of restored films from the developing world via the World Cinema Foundation.

Speaking at a press conference at the Cannes, Scorsese announced Friday that he has formed partnerships with B-Side Entertainment, a digital technology company, and The Auteurs, a virtual cinematheque, to allow audiences to see restored films from a part of the world where cinematic culture has no funding to be preserved.

“There are so many pictures in need of restoration and preservations, which for many reasons are not getting the attention they deserve,” said Scorsese. “Restoring and preserving is only half the battle, because in order to be appreciated, they have to be seen.”

He also announced that Kent Jones, the former New York Film Society associate director of programming, would be the new executive director of the world foundation.

Scorsese is the founder and chairman of the World Cinema Foundation, dedicated to preserving and restoring neglected films from the developing world.

TheAuteurs.com is an online movie theater for independent film, which will create a special portal for world foundation films.

Among the restored films being presented at Cannes include "Al Momia," or “The Mummy,” a 1969 Egyptian film, and Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gomez Muriel’s "Redes," or “The Wave,” from Mexico in 1936.

"It is a crisis already," Scorsese said. "A lot will be lost. But we'll save something." 

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The line was crowded with distributors outside Paul Verhoeven’s new film, “Teenagers,” which debuted on Friday at the Cannes film market with no distributor attached.

This was a surprise. Who knew that the director of “Showgirls,” “Basic Instinct” and “Starship Troopers” had an under-the-radar pet project about the sexual lives of teenaged boys? 

Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics and Adam Yauch of Oscilloscope were among those lined up to see it. The theater was full. Fans waited breathlessly outside to see if any seats would open up.

They did, within, mmmm, seconds of the lights being dimmed.

Turns out that guy in the blond wig and diamond earring loitering outside the hall (at right) was the director, Paul Verhoeven. Just not that Paul Verhoeven (below).

“He’s my cousin,” said Verhoeven, whose film -- which appeared to have been shot on video and edited during the height of that era -- was his first.

The 67-year-old filmmaker said he has spent a career as a computer programmer. He has also been an organist which explained, he said, his ability to write and perform the score himself.

Barker lasted about five minutes in the theater. Yauch followed about two minutes later.

“This might actually be the worst film at the festival,” said Yauch. “Something like, ‘I decided to do a film, and I know nothing about film.’”

 Verhoeven explained: "It's a film for 11 and 12-year-olds. But unfortunately, we need adults to distribute it."

With the international box office dominating the movie business in the way that it does, it is no wonder that Louise Chater has found her role growing in conversations about the studio’s summer blockbusters.

Her London-based company, First Movies, conducts international market research -- focus groups in Mexico, trailer analysis in Russia, test screenings in India -- the same type of work that drives studio marketing choices in the States, while also driving studio executives to distraction.

Chater’s company is much smaller than Hollywood’s big research guns -- OTX, MarketCast and National Research Group (and NRG , MarketCast and OTX have international divisions) -- but specializes in understanding foreign culture as a marketing challenge.

And now that the box office represents 66 percent of Hollywood ticket sales, it’s a bit of a wonder that Chater isn’t tops on the moguls’ speed dials. The success of huge-budget movies like “GI Joe,” “Terminator Salvation” and “Up” depend heavily on whether they translate for international audiences, and can find the core fan base for those films abroad.

“Increasingly the studios are looking to us not only for numerical findings, but for context for those figures,” said Chater, chatting one evening along the Croisette in Cannes, as “Lawrence of Arabia” played on a giant screen on the beach in the background. “We’re always looking for patterns across countries, and you can draw similarities among cultures.”

Russia and Japan, for example, share cultural similarities that affect movie marketing. In both of those countries, said Chater, people commonly attend movies solo. And in both of those cultures, the male-oriented, macho culture makes the action-adventure genre inherently strong.

By contrast, Mediterranean and South American countries with strong Catholic traditions suggest other movie choices -- “that tips into female-friendly movies, and family movies,” Chater said.

It isn’t possible to test so widely across the world and come up with the bedrock statistics that researchers have in the United States. And Chater spends a lot of time on airplanes, ensuring quality control; she conducts tests in more than a dozen countries, including across Europe, and in the burgeoning film markets of Russia, South Korea, Brazil and India.

A Cambridge-trained former teacher, Chater started out in market research in 1996, with a company called Youth Direct, in which she tapped into the pop culture views of teenagers. But her work for the studios came to a halt in 1999, when the then-powerful NRG invoked an exclusivity clause in its studio contracts.

“I came up against a brick wall, and I tiptoed away,” Chater says. “It was extraordinary.”

But times were changing, and it turned out that the studios wanted an alternative to NRG, particularly Fox and Disney. Chater started First Movies a year later.

“The studios collectively supported me, they said, ‘We want a change.’”

But one core element of market research Chater will not do: tracking and projections.

“We can test whatever we’re asked to test, but I will not do box office projections,” she said. “There are just too many variables. You have to factor in so many things -- you have to factor in the weather. And I still think it’s the wrong game to play.”

She’s aware that all her competitors play that game. She doesn’t know why, since the studios constantly complain to her about it. “I get calls every day regarding tracking,” she said. “It has such a negative perception. And yet everybody pays for it.”

That’s Hollywood. 
 

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If America is in the mood for extravagant love, they will embrace Jane Campion’s new period love story, “Bright Star,” which screened for a jam-packed press audience on Friday morning in the main hall of the Palais de Festival.

Not since the days of Campion’s own “The Piano” and the outbreak of Jane Austen mania in the 1990s have we seen a period film this unabashedly in love with tragic love.

Ben Whishaw plays John Keats, the Romantic poet in his early 20s, still mired in obscurity and, not insignificantly, poverty. He falls in love with his neighbor, Fanny Brawne, an 18-year-old (played by Abbie Cornish) who spends every waking moment mooning over him and fretting that they cannot marry. (Old story: no money.)

To make matters worse, Keats died at 25 of tuberculosis.

Being Campion, the subject is treated with lush and loving photography, and the story is told with a stripped-down simplicity that serves the authenticity of the tale. Her film is utterly unlike our modern world -- quiet, slowly-paced, reflective and obsessed with an impossible hunger between two young (chaste) lovers who live next door to one another.

Underlying the story, though, lurks the enduring, sensual verse of Keats, he of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “to a Nightingale,” on melancholy, indolence, death and -- of course -- love.

Campion gave a press conference with the cast but didn’t get to the questions that many of us want to know: why is she so persistently drawn to 19th century romance? And why does she take so long between her films (her last film was “In the Cut” in 2003)?

Instead the director was asked how she could make a film like this relevant to the Twittering set, and how she avoided the cinematic clichés associated with 19th century romance.

“The dream of love is so eternal, I’m sure twittering is very compelling for this generation,” she said. “It’s this thing of connection that anchors us.”

She said to the other: “It was important to me to tell an intimate story, and to make nothing of the fact that it was a period film. To keep it very simple, and not to focus on grand houses or costumes. I just wanted the characters to be there.”

I’ll be talking to Campion on Sunday, where I’ll ask her these questions and any others you might send my way. Bob Berney will be distributing the film in the fall  in the United States.

Later today: Martin Scorsese.

Ah, France. Where the people smell of red wine at 8:30 in the morning, and where they’ll happily charge you $5 for a croissant along the Cannes croisette.

Remember you’re in France, so even though half of Hollywood swarms across the town, so does the entire European and international movie industry. So here, Hollywood is in the minority -- especially this year with so few American films in competition.

The British film “Fish Tank” screened for the press on Thursday morning, and stars a new-to-the-screen teenaged actress, Katie Jarvis, who plays a 15-year-old. The film is a bleak, verite-inspired story of a young British girl who has a sexual experience with her mother’s boyfriend, among other disturbing experiences.

Director Andrea Arnold (pictured at left) has been to Cannes before with her film “Red Road” and came back with the same crew, except for Jarvis. The 17-year-old actress was not at the festival because she’s just had a baby. Interesting life; the teen, who had never acted before, was discovered by a producer on a train platform in Tilsbury.

“We found her in the station having an argument with her boyfriend who was on another platform,” said Arnold. “She was giving him grief, so she stood out.”

Meanwhile, another acquisition happened overnight. Bob Berney, who is rumored to be close to announcing a new and still-unnamed distribution company backed by River Road’s Bill Pohald, picked up Jane Campion new film, “Bright Star."

The 19th-century romantic drama is about the love affair between dying poet John Keats and his next-door neighbor, Fanny Brawne. It stars Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw and will screen on Friday.

"Bright Star is a tour-de-force from Jane Campion," Berney said in a statement. "She has created a film that's classic, yet uniquely modern."