Sofia Coppola takes "token male" Colin Farrell to girls' school in "The Beguiled"

Record ID: 876716

  • Title: Sofia Coppola takes "token male" Colin Farrell to girls' school in "The Beguiled"
  • Date: 24th May 2017
  • Summary: CANNES, FRANCE (MAY 24, 2017) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, NICOLE KIDMAN, SAYING: "Luckily, we had Jane Campion and Sofia here. Obviously we as women have to support female directors. That's just a given now. I mean hopefully that will change over time. But everyone keeps saying oh it's so different now it's so different. It isn't. Listen to that." VARIOUS SHOTS FROM INSIDE THE PRESS CONFERENCE (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, COLIN FARRELL, SAYING: "And Sofia sets a very particular mood in the working environment, of comfort and ease and trust and an environment that allows you as an actor to play and allows you to explore. So I had to, it was really, I mean it was really, I've been doing this 20 years and I've said a couple of times I think it was my favourite experience, my favourite shoot." END OF PRESS CONFERENCE COLIN FARRELL NICOLE KIDMAN WIDE OF PRESS CONFERENCE COPOLLA
  • Embargoed: 7th June 2017 13:07
  • Keywords: Cannes film festival film festival Cannes film movie Colin Farrell Sofia Coppola
  • Location: CANNES, FRANCE AND VARIOUS UNIDENTIFIED FILM LOCATIONS
  • City: CANNES, FRANCE AND VARIOUS UNIDENTIFIED FILM LOCATIONS
  • Country: France
  • Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment,Film,Sport
  • Reuters ID: LVA0076I77VWT
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Sofia Coppola brought her remake of "The Beguiled" to Cannes on Wednesday (May 24), in which she puts Colin Farrell through the pleasures and pain that Clint Eastwood experienced in the 1971 original.
    Nicole Kidman pays the head of a school for gentile young ladies trapped behind the gates of a country mansion as the American Civil War rages around them. The arrival of Farrell, an injured Yankee soldier, awakens repressed desires.
    "At the core of it is the power struggles between the male and female ... hopefully in an entertaining and juicy story," Coppola told a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival.
    Years after seeing the Eastwood movie, by "Dirty Harry" director Don Siegel, Coppola decided it.
    "It really stayed in my mind. The premise was something I had never seen. The original movie is from the male point of view, the soldier's point of view of this women's world and I thought it would be interesting to back and find the book and tell the same premise from the women characters' point of view."
    "Colin, our token male, was a good sport about being our 'object'," she said of the only significant male presence among a cast that includes Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning.
    The film closed to rapturous applause in Cannes and the early reviews were positive, although some critics said it lacked some of the punch of the original.
    "As a comparison to Siegel's more problematic, yet also more full-throated, luridly bonkers take on Thomas Cullinan's novel, it feels strangely unkinked and scrubbed clean," wrote Jessica Kiang on website The Playlist.
    "But enough about what isn't here, because there's plenty that is, in particular the vivid and extremely present performances."
    If Coppola was looking for "juicy" performances, she got them, not least from Kidman, who oozes southern charm with an undercurrents of sexual desire and menace.
    After wishing Farrell a gentile "bon apetit" towards the end of the movie, Kiang said, "She gets a reaction shot at the head of a dinner table which would be worth the price of entry alone."
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