Out et about
Celebrity splashdown
He shoots, he stars
It's not too often you get to shake hands with a living legend. So, it's hard to believe that the dapper gent who strolls over and sits on the sofa less than a foot away is the most famous footballer ever, the only serious rival to Muhammad Ali in terms of global fame and universal iconhood. Now 64, Pelé has left his playing days behind him. He is entrenched in the high echelons of political power, and - weirdly - has become the international face of Viagra. His current endeavour is an "official" docu-biography called (with characteristic understatement) Pelé Forever.
There seems little point asking him if he has any problems in the trouser department himself (he has always denied it), so I ask what he wants to achieve with the film. Is he hoping to remind a younger generation of football fans of his stature? "Maybe," he says, in broken-accented English. "My father was a footballer, he scored five goals in one game by his head, but those days, you cannot prove. For my career, I have the proof on film. So you can compare it with the new generation."
What does he think of the modern game? "Of course it is all quicker, faster, but now, the players don't last too long. The big players play one, two, three years, then they disappear. Today is a more showbiz time. You can become a star in a second."
Pelé recalls his time on an earlier Hollywood toe-dip, Escape to Victory, where he, Bobby Moore and half the cup-winning Ipswich side of 1978 submitted to the ministrations of notorious cigar-chomper John Huston. "This was the first football film in 20 years. Now the business of film is more and more like football. I like the Beckham film, with the little romance as well." By this I assume he means Bend It Like Beckham, which helped kick-start the surge of modern football movies.
"Escape to Victory was my first film experience. Michael Caine, he helped me. But Huston help me the most." So did they teach you much? "Yes," he says, with a chuckle. "But not about football."
Andrew Pulver
Directors' fortnight
Trials by fire
British documentary-maker Kim Longinotto's film Sisters in Law, which deals with rape and divorce in Cameroon, screens in the Directors' Fortnight tomorrow. Here she explains its genesis:
There's a scene in Sisters in Law that always makes me laugh in an embarrassed way. Amina, a Muslim woman in Cameroon, is trying to divorce her husband. The [woman] judge says to her: "All men are brutal." You think at that moment that the world is two halves - men versus women - and we're in the women's half. Amina is actually doing something no one in Cameroon has ever done before: suing her husband for divorce. She's going against everyone; all her family are telling her to stop. She's fighting for her life, as she sees it. In that situation, I suspect she really appreciates having us in the courtroom alongside her.
Our other main character, Sonita, is standing up for herself too. She's a nine-year-old girl who is testifying that her neighbour raped her. It's a very brave thing for a little girl to do, especially as the accused was trying to intimidate her while she was giving evidence. I admired the way the judge and prosecutor - both women - dealt with the situation. They made it very unthreatening for her, helping her to speak out. They are judges and prosecutors, but are also very female about it. I kept thinking of Victoria Climbié - I wish somebody had talked to her the way those two women did.
We finished making Sisters in Law a few months ago, and it was originally supposed to be shown on TV in March. But Peter Dale, our commissioning editor, wanted to hold it back and that gave us a chance for Cannes. For me, it's exciting when a film is in a cinema. It's so different seeing it on the big screen. I've always loved the idea of people watching it together. It was always our dream to have [my 1998 film] Divorce Iranian Style shown in the local cinema of the woman concerned. Cinemas are the one place in Iran where men and women can sit together. But it hasn't happened yet.
On the Croisette
Peckinpah, the wild one
It's late afternoon and Monte Hellman is reminiscing about his old friend Sam Peckinpah, whose film Ride the High Country has just been screened in a new print as part of a special festival tribute. "One night Sam came in at 10 o'clock. The first thing he did was piss out of the window," says Hellman, recalling his first day editing Peckinpah's martial-arts thriller, The Killer Elite. "He was so drunk, you would think it impossible he'd have an intelligent thing to say. But the opposite was the case. You couldn't believe that this kind of coherence was coming out of this seeming incoherence."
In Ride the High Country, which Hellman calls his favourite Peckinpah movie, Joel McCrea plays Steve Judd, an ageing cowboy. Judd is hired by a bank to take gold from a lawless mining town in the mountains back to the bank. In the film's most famous scene, Judd admits to his old misdeeds while talking about dignity, self-respect and his work ethic. "All I want is to enter my house justified," he declares to Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), another old-timer with a chequered past, as they ride through a sublime western landscape. It's a magical moment, combining nobility and pathos.
These words take on an ironic resonance when one considers Peckinpah's declining years. The image Hellman offers is of a browbeating alcoholic who treated his colleagues abominably. Some say he was broken after seeing his film Major Dundee cut to pieces by the studios. Some blame the effort of making The Wild Bunch for the change in his personality. But he still inspired extraordinary loyalty.
"You couldn't help but be aware of his humanity," says Hellman, whose classic Two-Lane Blacktop screens in Cannes this week. "No matter how much he tried to hide it, it came through. He moved me to tears in his films and he moved me to tears in our relationship. He was always a poet, hiding behind a mask of machismo."
Geoffrey Macnab