Every film that received a mixed reaction so far at the Cannes Film Festival — “Personal Shopper” (we didn’t like it), “It’s Only The End Of The World” (yep, it’s bad) and “The Neon Demon” (they’re crazy, this rocks) — feels like a masterpiece compared to Sean Penn‘s “The Last Face” (a complete mess). The director rounded up a terrific cast in Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Jared Harris, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Jean Reno, but somehow managed to make a universally panned, melodramatic puddle of a film with them that, like some of the aforementioned films, was booed.
READ MORE: Cannes Review: Sean Penn’s ‘The Last Face’ Starring Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem
The movie tracks the romance between doctors working for an international aid organization in Africa, who are also divided on the solutions facing the war-torn country they’re operating in. Following the screening, the director and his cast then bravely faced journalists at the film’s press conference. As each of them fumbled to find the right words, the stilted awkwardness in the packed conference room could be cut with a knife as members of the press politely dodged all of the film’s major issues. Unsurprisingly, it was a brief affair, lasting all of half an hour. Here are some of the highlights:
On deciding to join the project
“As with any movie one makes as a director, the opportunity is there to ask what is really gonna interest you for the period of time you have to be making the movie, so what interests you are things that come with questions you can only understand fully when you approach [the movie]. The definitions of empowerment have great accepted successes and there’s a strange dichotomy where the world itself is on its hardest times and more people are suffering,” Penn said. “So with a film like this, where it’s as much the question of love as it is with war, and the way those things seem to blend, it was constantly interesting to me to learn the movie and to wonder if it’s a love story, to wonder if, like countries, people who don’t find compromise basically produce war. I’ve come to feel the genius of generosity and we see less and less of it.”
“The first time I read the script by Eric Dignam was in 2000, and since then I was interested in the characters and the love story,” Bardem, who was attached to the movie before Penn, said. “He got my attention through the the love story, actually. Of course the surroundings of that love story makes the movie unique, but it was more about the relationship that brought me to it.”
Sean Penn doesn’t want to discuss the reviews
“Well, I’ve finished the film so it’s not a discussion that I feel like I can be of any value to. I stand behind the film as it is, and certainly everybody is [entitled] to have a different response,” he said diplomatically.
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Avoiding cultural imperialism in Hans Zimmer’s score
“Hans and I have worked before; he’s an extraordinary composer. We talked very early on that we wanted to avoid what we call cultural imperialism and not necessarily go and compose African music with a story particularly focused — in terms of the primary relationship — on a white South African and non-African in Africa, so the music was always there to track the restlessness of people like this,” Penn explained. “But you find a kind of cohesion to keep moving back and forth and to find out who these people at the core really are to each other and the kind of lives they choose to live and whether that changes. Those were the kind of ideas behind [the music].”
The real heroes
“People who are trying to feed their kids with a horrible salary, or unemployment: Those are heroes. My responsibility as an actor in this movie was not to betray what [the real doctors volunteering in war zones] do for a living. I mean, they are being bombed as we speak in Syria. If those people are not heroes…,” Bardem said.
Charlize Theron agreed, adding,”I feel like from the outside, a lot of those who work in these brutal circumstances, I look at them with admiration and respect for the dedication they give their entire lives to. The ones that I’ve met, if you said to them, ‘I think you’re a hero’ — I don’t think that’s why they do it, I don’t think they think of themselves that way. I think that’s the true beauty of it: There’s no ego. I think they’re there just as human beings and there’s this interconnectedness they feel with the people they’re working with, and living with and trying to help. That puts them on such a equal footing and I can’t even imagine someone saying to Wren [her character in the film], ‘I think you’re a hero.’ I think she’d laugh at that.”
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Sean Penn had no issues with egos on set
“Jack Kerouac said something I’ll repeat now: He said, ‘Someday I will find the right words, and they will be simple.’ Your first challenge is dealing with your own ego on anything that you’re doing. So the rest of it, just like everybody in life: There are challenges of ego,” he said. “I watched this film for hundreds and hundreds of hours, and the gifts that the humility and the egos of the people around me brought are more valuable than a discussion about what was difficult. In this case, there were such exceptions as well; there are people on this table who are so extraordinarily humble and we all benefited from that.”
Entertainment and Donald Trump
“I think it’s important to entertain if entertainment is not synonymous with…[long pause]…Donald Trump‘s behavior. Too much of film is today, I think. Greek tragedy is almost forgotten, which I find is pulling us away from humanity a lot of the time,” Penn reflected. “But to find beauty in things is the way to fix things. I just think that what we’re calling beauty today is largely a perversion of it. That’s lamentable.”
Check out the full press conference below.