Oscar-winning writer-director Michel Hazanavicius opted to pull his comedy Final Cut from its opening night slot at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year when Covid forced the event to go virtual. Ultimately, the movie opened the Cannes Film Festival.
Speaking to Deadline on the Riviera, Hazanavicius said of Final Cut, “It’s a film that could be seen at home, but to present it to the world, everyone at home, it didn’t seem to us the best way to do a world premiere around the film. We didn’t make the choice to come here, we made the choice to leave Sundance and the Sundance Festival let us go. And then we had the luck and privilege to be selected here in the magic slot of the opening.”
Hazanavicius visited with Deadline alongside his wife and Final Cut star Berenice Bejo and co-star Romain Duris. Check out our discussion in the video above.
Final Cut is about the making of a low-budget bad zombie movie and is a remake of Shin’ichiro Ueda’s 2017 Japanese hit One Cut of the Dead (itself adapted from the play Ghost in the Box).
Bejo, who Deadline’s Pete Hammond said in his review, “becomes perfect casting in all the iterations of Final Cut, even managing to look fetching with an ax in her head,” told us that being back in Cannes and reconnecting with cinema was like a “party… everyone was so happy, the public too to see actors again, directors, producers on the red carpet.”
Hazanavicius noted that after a period where Cannes was somewhat overshadowed by “soccer players and models,” there is a renewed focus on cinema.
Duris for his part doesn’t feel Cannes has changed that much over time, “The steps are still red,” he joked, but added that it seems like this year there is “a new permission to dream.”
Aero is the official sponsor of the Deadline Studio at Cannes Film Festival, sponsors are Soia & Kyo and Jamones Iberico from Spain: Ambassadors of Europe in the World