BBC News Online: Entertainment

Friday, 12 May, 2000, 03:46 GMT 04:46 UK
Hackman makes Cannes debut


 
French Connection star Gene Hackman has appeared at the Cannes Film Festival
for the first time, to attend the preview of his latest movie, Under Suspicion.

It's been a labour of love
Gene Hackman

The Oscar-winning star told how his accidental encounter with the French thriller
Garde A Vue sparked an obsessive desire to retell the story in his own way.
Hackman, who plays a rich lawyer locked in interrogation by a police chief in
Under Suspicion, said he first saw the original after sneaking into a screening
without paying.
 
At a news conference with co-stars Morgan Freeman and Monica Bellucci,
Hackman said: "I'd actually gone in to see another film, which I walked out of,
and I went in with my daughter and saw this - so I didn't pay.  "We loved it. I went
back the next day and saw it again, and now I've seen it several dozen times. It's
been a labour of love."  Freeman said he had been involved with the project since
being shown Garde A Vue by Hackman several years ago.  He said: "It's very
special for us. We've been trying to get this film on for a number of years."
Cannes is 'old Hollywood'  Asked why he had taken so long to appear at Cannes,
Hackman said: "I'm not very good at all the crowds and everything.  "I like the idea
of it because it's the old kind of Hollywood, with French films, and I like the excitement
of all that, but the actual partaking of that is very difficult."  He told how he grew up
on a diet of foreign films and cultivated an interest in starring in thrillers because of the
tension.  The star of Unforgiven and Mississippi Burning joked: "We are not trained to
sit in cars that turn upside down and catch on fire, although we have to do that
sometimes to pay the bills."  Under Suspicion's British director, Stephen Hopkins,
whose other credits include special effects movies Predator 2 and Lost In Space,
said the thought of making action films had started to lose its allure.
"Usually, the movies I make didn't bother having scripts," he said.  

Click here for photos of Gene at the Festival

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/entertainment/745684.stm


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