CANNES, France — The Cannes Film Festival has played host to the directorial debuts of three stars: Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Stewart and relative newcomer Harris Dickinson.
Their films are very different but the fulfillment of longtime dreams of being behind the camera. All three movies are part of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, which has helped launch the careers of directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, Lynne Ramsay and Molly Manning Walker.
At 28, Dickinson is an up-and-coming actor, known for “Babygirl,” “Where the Crawdads Sing” and the Palme d’Or-winning “Triangle of Sadness,” who worked for years to develop his film, “Urchin.”
Johansson, a two-time Oscar acting nominee who’s been a star since her teens and played Black Widow in multiple Marvel films, brought “Eleanor the Great,” a film about a nonagenarian who coopts her late friend’s Holocaust story, to Cannes this week.
Stewart, also an acting Oscar nominee, debuted “The Chronology of Water,” an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, last week.
Awards for the Un Certain Regard section will be announced Friday, a day before the Cannes Film Festival closes.
Here’s what the actors-turned-directors had to say about their first forays into creating a film from behind the camera.
“I wanted to direct from a very young age. I wanted to make films,” says Dickinson, who got his start as many young creators do now: on YouTube. He even had a web sketch series. “That was my first love, just making things.”
Dickinson’s profile as an actor has exploded in recent years, but his desire to direct was so strong, he started saying no to roles.
“’Urchin’ was all I could think about. It was pouring out of me. It was all that was on my mind,” he said. “It’s easy to say no when you’ve got something to take you away from that, you know? Nothing that came in would make me question my own film, which is a sign that I had to make it at this time.”
The film stars Frank Dillane as a homeless Londoner suffering from drug addiction.
Johansson is now one of the world’s most recognizable stars. She’s also one of its most respected, earning two Oscar nominations in 2020, for “Marriage Story” and “Jojo Rabbit.”
Her success as an actor helped her take on new roles on films, including producing, and, now, directing.
“At some point, I worked enough that I stopped worrying about not working, or not being relevant — which is very liberating,” Johansson says. “I think it’s something all actors feel for a long time until they don’t. I would not have had the confidence to direct this film 10 years ago.”
She says that throughout her career, imagining how to make movies has been part of her process: “Whether it was reading something and thinking, ‘I can envision this in my mind,’ or even being on a production and thinking, ‘I am directing some elements of this out of necessity.’”
The New York-set “Eleanor the Great” stars June Squibb as a 94-year-old who, out of grief and loneliness, takes over her friend’s story of Holocaust survival as her own.
“It was eight years in the making and then a really accelerated push. It’s an obvious comparison but it was childbirth,” says Stewart of the film. “I was pregnant for a really long time and then I was screaming bloody murder.”
Stewart in interviews has talked about challenging the myth that men are better suited to directing.
“It’s really not fair for people to think it’s hard to make a movie insofar as you need to know things before going into it. There are technical directors, but, Jesus Christ, you hire a crew. You just have a perspective and trust it,” she said. “My inexperience made this movie.”
Yuknavitch’s memoir recounts her surviving sexual abuse by her father and how she sought refuge in competitive swimming and, later, writing.
While Stewart expressed doubts that she offered much to her film’s star, Imogen Poots, in terms of useful direction, the actor disagrees.
“Kristen is incredibly present but at the same has this ability, like a plant or something, to pick up on a slight shift in the atmosphere where it’s like: ‘Wait a minute,’” Poots said, causing Stewart to laugh. “There is this insane brain at play and it’s a skill set that comes in the form of an intense curiosity.”
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