Last year on the first day of Cannes, few outside of France had heard of Jean Dujardin. He then went on to win the festival’s Best Actor prize and, months later, an Oscar. You may not be able to pronounce Matthias Schoenaerts’ name now, but after a starring role in Jacques Audiard’s Competition film Rust & Bone opposite Marion Cotillard, this brawny Belgian may just be this year’s breakout star.

After a solid career at home, Schoenaerts exploded onto the global film scene last year with his starring role in the Oscar-nominated Bullhead.
“This experience taught me a lot about myself and about being an actor,” he says of Rust & Bone. “Working with someone like Jacques is something I’ll never forget. It was just incredible.”

In the film, Schoenaerts’ Ali is a burly jock who finds himself homeless and looking for work while also burdened with his young son.
“Ali is an ambiguous character — he’s likeable and funny, but also violent and repugnant,” he explains. “As an actor, I need to like my character. My job is to defend him, so I need to fall in love with the character.”

Cotillard’s Stephanie does fall in love with the character as he helps her cope with her handicap after losing her legs in an amusement park accident.

“He knows he doesn’t have much to offer a woman financially or intellectually. All he has is his body,” he says.

Like he did in Bullhead, Schoenaerts had to physically prepare for his role in Audiard’s drama.

“I’d lost pretty much all of the weight from Bullhead. Then Jacques asked me to bulk up for this role,” but, he adds, “not in the same way as Bullhead — less muscular and more natural.”

Unlike Dujardin, this actor speaks perfect English, with only a slight European accent. Repped by CAA stateside, Schoenaerts will be putting his English lessons to good use when he heads to New York in June for a supporting role in Guillaume Canet’s English-language Blood Ties.

Schoenaerts also has a role in Erik Van Looy’s English-language Loft with Karl Urban.

That doesn’t mean he’s rushing to the spotlight.“I love being the underdog,” he says. “I don’t like when people expect too much, because then I’ll only be disappointed if things don’t work out. I don’t like to think about it. I’ll let life take me where it will.”

Source
Tweet

Share/Bookmark

But there may be more to come from the Weinsteins. The plugged in Thompson On Hollywood is hearing that Harv and co. may also snap up the rights to James Gray’s ’20s set immigration drama “Low Life” starring Joaquin Phoenix, Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Renner. The Weinsteins have worked with Gray before back in their Miramax days, backing the excellent “The Yards” and it seems their ready to re-up that relationship. Gray had previously told us the film could be ready in time for TIFF, which would be a nice pic for Harv to rep. Right now, the Weinsteins are unloading two mega titles at Cannes in “Lawless” and “Killing Them Softly” and currently have Dustin Hoffman’s “Quartet” and the ’50s set French rom-com “Populaire” waiting in the wings for any kind of fall appearance. “Low Life” would certainly boost that slate.

Anyway, a lot more deals to be done over the next ten days. The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 16-27.

Source
Tweet

Share/Bookmark

Marion covers the May issue of The Hollywood Reporter. The magazine is out on May 18. I have added some of her outtakes.

Gallery Links:
May 2012: The Hollywood Reporter
2012: Set 001

Read her interview with THR below:

Marion Cotillard heard from her CAA agent Hylda Queally in late 2010 that director Christopher Nolan wanted her for a role in his next movie. The French actress, of course, was ecstatic. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, his next movie is supposed to be Batman!’ And I’ve always been obsessed with Batman.”

Her heart sank, however, when she learned The Dark Knight Rises — the final part of Nolan’s Batman trilogy — would likely start shooting in May 2011, precisely when her first child, Marcel, with actor-director Guillaume Canet, was due. “I called Chris and said, ‘My God, I can’t do that!’ ” Luckily, Nolan — who already had worked with the star on Inception — was prepared to wait. ” ‘I’m writing now and nothing is impossible,’ ” the actress recalls him telling her. ” ‘We don’t know where we are shooting, and I’ll try to make it work.’ ”

The fact that one of Hollywood’s top directors was prepared to change his shooting schedule and maybe even his script for the most anticipated movie of 2012 — all based on Cotillard’s availability — was indicative of how big a superstar the 36-year-old has become in the four years since she won an Oscar for playing the tiny, gut-wrenching singer Edith Piaf (known in France as “the little sparrow”) in La Vie en Rose.

With a gentle, almost ethereal presence, Cotillard since has exhibited a screen persona that stands in stark contrast to the ferociously intense Piaf. But it has endeared her to major directors ranging from Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) to Steven Soderbergh (Contagion) to Rob Marshall (Nine) to Michael Mann (Public Enemies). One of the few international actresses to have found success in America (fellow French stars Isabelle Adjani and Juliette Binoche have come and gone), Cotillard is a Hollywood favorite, having recently wrapped director James Gray’s still-untitled Ellis Island period piece with Jeremy Renner and Joaquin Phoenix.

“I knew she was a great artist,” says Mann, recalling how she boldly plunged into the dark realm of Chicago’s strip clubs to research aspects of her role as the half-French, half-Indian Billie Frechette, a bartender and singer who becomes involved with John Dillinger in Public Enemies. “But what I found with her was it’s all about the work, all about the commitment. Her energy evolves from this devotion to acting as an art. You don’t want anything else.”

Now she comes to the Cannes Film Festival competition for the first time, having been unable to attend last year for Midnight in Paris after giving birth. Her presence on the Riviera unites France’s No. 1 star with its foremost art house director, Jacques Audiard, whose previous film, A Prophet, was nominated for a foreign-language film Oscar in 2010.

Their joint effort, Rust and Bone, may sound trite — it’s the story of a young whale trainer (Cotillard) who gets into a terrible accident that leaves her paraplegic then becomes involved with a homeless fighter (Matthias Schoenaerts) — but given Audiard’s gritty, brutal style, nobody expects this to be Free Willy français. (The film had not been screened at press time. It will be released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics this year.)

Rust has not been without controversy. Just two weeks before Cannes, the French blogosphere lit up after Cotillard told a French magazine, Obsession (a spinoff of the highly respected Le Nouvel Observateur), that she had shot the movie when she was still meant to be exclusively available for Knight.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet

Share/Bookmark

Looks like Blood Ties will start filming in New York tomorrow:

According to one of our tipsters, Patrick, Blood Ties is filming at 116th and Adam Clayton Powell Blvd (7th Ave) in New York City tomorrow!

Clive Owen, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard and James Caan star in this big screen adaptation of the French novel Les liens du sang.

The movie will follow a younger brother (Crudup), who is forced to ask his convict older brother (Owen) to return to the world of underground crime and help protect their family. Cotillard and Kunis will reportedly play the two leads’ romantic interests.

The movie is expected to continue filming in NYC through mid-July.

Source
Tweet

Share/Bookmark

Another update in regards to Marion’s upcoming film, The Dark Knight Rises:

After wowing audiences with the IMAX portions of The Dark Knight in 2008, Christopher Nolan is back behind the 65mm lens for July 20th’s The Dark Knight Rises which, The Wall Street Journal today revealed, will include over an hour of IMAX footage, making it the biggest use of the format in a Hollywood film.

Nolan, who spoke about IMAX at length in an interview last week, isn’t the only director keen on the format. Last year’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol also included scenes designed specifically for IMAX viewing while quite a few entries this summer have been designed to be shown in IMAX theaters even without having shot on 65mm. Last week it was announced that The Hunger Games will return for a week-long IMAX run before theaters switch over to the next major release, Marvel’s The Avengers.

Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Morgan Freeman, The Dark Knight Rises features a script by both Nolan and his brother, Jonathan Nolan.

Source
Tweet

Share/Bookmark

3rd trailer for The Dark Knight Rises will be showing during The Avengers theatrical release on May 4:

A new trailer for Warner Bros. and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises will be released in less than two weeks time.

The Dark Knight Rises trailer, the third for those keeping count, will be attached to Marvel and Disney’s The Avengers beginning May 4. Nolanfans got the trailer confirmation from WB Exhibitor website which clearly shows the trailer’s existence and debut date. It also confirms The Dark Knight Rises trailer will appear in 2D and 3D traditional and IMAX screenings.

You might be wondering why Warner Bros. and DC Comics would attach their big summer tentpole on the competition’s film. It’s all about playing to the target audience and The Avengers is a perfect fit, especially considering its near record-breaking opening weekend tracking. As Nolanfans points out, the third trailer for The Dark Knight made its debut attached to Iron Man in 2008. Similarly, Inception’s last trailer was first spotted in front of Iron Man 2.

If any of you needed a little extra push to go watch The Avengers theatrically next month, The Dark Knight Rises trailer should do the trick. Batman’s final fight under the direction of Christopher Nolan will take its own shot at box office records beginning July 20.

The Dark Knight Rises stars Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine and Marion Cotillard.

Source

Tweet

Share/Bookmark