In that recently-posted Deadline interview between Mike Fleming and Francis Coppola, the 80-year-old director briefly tears into author and former Premiere editor Peter Biskind, claiming unfairness on Biskind’s part in a 1990 piece about The Godfather, Part III, especially regarding Sofia Coppola‘s performance as Michael Corleone’s daughter.

I asked Biskind this morning if there’s anything he wants to dispute or clarify. His statement follows an excerpt from the Deadline interview:

Fleming: “You took some heat casting your daughter Sofia, who has become a fine filmmaker in her own right. Was it right to put so much pressure on her, when she was untested?”

Coppola: “Well, I felt betrayed by a journalist by the name of Peter Biskind. And Tina Brown. I was asked if a journalist could come to the set and report on the movie, but Peter came in with a story all ready to write because he knew that there was a controversy about the fact that I had cast Sofia. He’s the one [who] came out with the article first that sort of greatly criticized her performance and started that whole trend, that I had cast my daughter when Paramount didn’t want me to.

“I felt that the plot of Godfather III was that they were coming for Michael but they got her. And [in the press] they were coming for me but they chose Sofia. I don’t have malice against anyone at this point in my life, but, to this day, it upsets me that Peter Biskind was the one who was given access to the set and he used it to damn my daughter. I believe that in a new [forthcoming] version of the film (to be titled The Death of Michael Corleone), Sofia’s performance will vindicate her.”

Biskind replies: “Francis would be better served resting on his considerable laurels than nursing old grudges. So far as Sofia is concerned, it’s nice to see the Lion King spring to the defense of his cubs, but generally I like her films, and don’t recall maligning her. Besides [Francis and I] were supposed to have kissed and made up 20 years ago when he publicly forgave me for my sins. This reminds me of Godfather II, when Michael forgives Fredo and then has him killed.”

Evidence of Donald Trump‘s racism has been so abundant over the last three and a half to four years (not to mention the Central Park Five statements that he made 30 years ago) that there doesn’t seem to be anything to say except “what else is new?” But every so often a quote will come along that renews the revulsion. Not among the Trump faithful, of course. Semi-normal people, I mean.

In a day-old Atlantic article titled “An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry,” white nationalist figurehead Richard Spencer says that August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville “would not have occurred without Trump” becoming president.

Spencer, the rally’s organizer and the guy who coined the term “alt-right,” said it “really was because of [Trump’s] campaign and this new potential for a nationalist candidate who was resonating with the public in a very intense way. [The] alt-right found something in Trump. He changed the paradigm and made this kind of public presence of the alt-right possible.”

The Charlottesville rally led to the murder of Heather Heyer, caused by a white racist who plowed through a crowd of liberal counter-protestors with his car. The same day Trump deplored the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” A few days later he re-stated there were “very fine people on both sides.”

The first truly exciting film of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival screened this afternoon — Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables. Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly knit Muslim community, it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.

Start to finish Les Miserables is rough, riveting, incendiary — written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard. It generally feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a dash of the anxious urban energy of William Freidkin‘s The French Connection.

But it’s about more than just urban action beats. It’s a racially charged tragedy, injected with sharp social detail and several strong (if somewhat sketchy) characters on both sides of the tale. It’s a bit splotchy and slapdash at times, but is quite the ride.

Part policier and part social-canvas suspenser, Les Miserables is basically about conflicted cops (including one bad apple) under pressure vs. a crew of scrappy, rambunctious, vaguely criminal kids in the ‘hood. It takes the side of Montfermeil natives (Ly was raised there) but also portrays the cops in reasonably fair and humanistic terms.

Closing motto: “There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”

The story is about a mischievous Muslim kid named Issa (Issa Perica) who gets himself into hot water by stealing a lion cub from a small local circus. The circus guys angrily threaten some Montfermeil community leaders (not the suit-wearing kind), and soon after the film’s three plainclothes protagonists — the racist and brutish Chris (Alexis Manenti), a casually brusque but decent-hearted Montfermeil native named Gwada (Djibril Zonga) and Stephane (Damien Bonnard), a new transfer with a curtly liberal, mildly compassionate approach to police work — are on the hunt.

They eventually chase down and capture Issa, but then comes the triggering incident: an agitated Gwada fires a flashbang (a non-lethal stun grenade) into the kid’s face. Luckily Issa recovers, but Chris and Gwada go into panic mode when they quickly realize that the incident has been captured by a drone-mounted video camera. Despite Stephane’s objections, the priority becomes finding and destroying the visual evidence.

Things get increasingly hairy and desperate, ultimately leading to a climax…okay, I’ve said enough.

I won’t reveal the finish but it reminded me of the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation. I for one found it satisfying.

The news about Focus Features having bought international rights to Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, which will screen in the Directors’ Fortnight section on Sunday, obviously ups interest levels. Which means that getting into either of the two Lighthouse screenings (8:45 am and 8:30 pm) will require extra determination and stamina.

Elite press badges cut no ice at Directors Fortnight screenings. Everyone is on an equal footing, so you just have to line up outside the J.W. Marriott and hope you’ve arrived early enough. Gaspar Noe‘s Climax was the hottest Directors Fortnight attraction last year, and it took me two tries before I got in.

The Lighthouse solution, I’ve decided, will require a 6 am Sunday wake-up and arriving at the Marriott by 7 or 7:15 am. I recently urged an industry friend, who’s intrigued by The Lighthouse having been shot on 35mm black-and-white celluloid, to join me at that hour. I explained that the 8:45 am offers the only realistic shot because access to the 8:30 pm screening will be a huge time-eater. Awaking at dawn is simply a matter of will.

In a run-up piece on Rocketman by Variety‘s Mark Malkin, producer Matthew Vaughn recalls how Tom Hardy was attached to play Elton John in an earlier incarnation.

Vaughn scoffed at Hardy’s idea to lip-synch John’s singing. Vaughn: “I feel like an idiot saying it now, but I said, ‘Nobody is going to watch a movie where the lead character is lip synching.’ Cut to Bohemian Rhapsody and me being proven wrong.”

Taron Egerton, who plays John in Rocketman (which is screening here on Friday morning) is a first-rate singer, but his John imitation (to go by the trailer) doesn’t quite get it — close but a degree or two removed from take-it-to-the-bank authenticity.

“I knew how well Taron could sing and musicals are like action movies,” Vaughn tells Malkin. “If you look at Tom Cruise, you know he’s doing it. I’m hoping people are going to lose their minds for Taron when they hear him sing.”

Of the three films I’m planning to catch today, Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles‘ Brazilian, politically-driven Bacarau (which screens tonight at 10 pm) seems to have a special energy, to go by the trailer. Filho’s last film, Aquarius, played in Cannes three years ago. Sonia Braga stars in both.

Boilerplate: “Bacurau, a small town in the Brazilian countryside, mourns the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, its inhabitants notice that their community has vanished from most maps.”

Filho to The Jarkata Post: “I am a Brazilian filmmaker. I live at a time when Brazilian society is suffering and stories are springing up.”

I’ve just read an excellent, day-and-a-half-old Michael Fleming interview with Francis Coppola. (It was posted at Cannes dinner hour on Monday, 5.13).

It reminded me what a great and expansive interview subject Coppola can be when the spigots are truly turned on — a fact that I gratefully realized 38 years ago when I cold-called Coppola at the Sherry Netherland one night and got him to talk for nearly two hours. It resulted in a two-part transcript piece that I posted in The Film Journal, which I was managing editor of from late ’80 to the early summer of ’83.

Fleming’s q & a is a straight-on, plain-spoken review and summary of everything Coppola is, was and hopefully will be.

Among the topics: (a) His family, luck and longevity, and his up-and-down fortunes; (b) The ongoing saga of his long-delayed, now-in-preparation Megalopolis with possible castings of Jude Law and Shia Leboeuf; (c) Absorbing summaries of the shootings and backstage battles behind The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II, Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club; (d) Plans for a forthcoming, somewhat shorter re-edit of The Godfather, Part III (with Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone dying inside after the shooting death of his daughter rather than toppling over on his Italian-villa patio at the finale); (e) The touch-and-go beginnings of his hugely successful wine business; (f) A slam at former MGM honcho Gary Barber for being obstinate and obstructive over the re-edit of The Cotton Club (Coppola’s tale mirrors an HE account of this episode that I posted on on 9.7.17), and (g) an announcement that with Barber now out the door The Cotton Club Encore will be screened at the forthcoming 2019 New York Film Festival and receive a limited theatrical window before going to video and streaming.

It reminds, as I noted a year and two-thirds ago, that “one good thing came out of The Cotton Club was Michael Daly‘s “The Making of The Cotton Club,” a New York magazine article that ran 22 pages including art (pgs. 41 thru 63) and hit the stands on 5.7.84.

It was one of the most engrossing accounts of a troubled production I’ve ever read, and it still is. Dazzle and delusion, abrasive relationships, murder, tap dancing, “pussy”, cocaine, flim-flam, double talk, financial chicanery and Melissa Prophet. Excellent reporting, amusing, believable, tightly composed…pure dessert.

Coppola tells Fleming about the participation of a somewhat shady guy during the Cotton Club filming, and how he surprisingly came to be Coppola’s ally in some respects. Coppola calls him “Joey” but Daly’s piece identifies him. Coppola describes him as “pretty bright and, whatever his past was, pretty nice.”

Anyway, that’s it. Totally worth reading. As good as this sort of thing gets.

It rained last night in Cannes. The current weather forecast is for rain, clouds and chilliness for the next week or so — terrific. Today’s events are (a) a press conference for The Dead Don’t Die at 11 am (which I’m not inclined to attend), (b) Alice Silverstein‘s Bull at 2 pm, (c) Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables at 4:45 pm, and (c) Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s Bacarau at 10 pm.

Dry, droll and deadpan are what you always get with Jim Jarmusch (and that’s fine with me), but The Dead Don’t Die, a small-town zombie comedy, is too slow, passive, resigned, lethargic and self-referential. It kind of works during the first half, but gradually spaces itself out.

Die‘s central problem is that it’s about watching a zombie apocalypse rather than somehow dealing with it.

Strange as this sounds, none of the characters actually try to survive. Well, they do but half-heartedly. It’s a hipster goof-off riff, but if you want to get serious and divine a social-political message, the film is basically saying “we’re going so wrong now and are more or less fucked at this point so why even fight it?”

Jarmusch occasionally flirts with the thematic thrust of George Romero‘s Dawn of the Dead (passive, brain-dead consumers are real-life zombies) and takes shots at the spreading Trump cancer, but he doesn’t really engage. Well, he does but in the manner of an aging, despairing, heavy-lidded type.

The Dead Don’t Die is baroquely amusing here and there, but the mood of laid-back nihilism and a general “submission to the plague” mentality is too persistent. Around the two-thirds mark the lack of any semblance of narrative energy starts to work against itself.

Horror fans are going to stay away in droves, Joe Popcorn is going to say “where’s the movie?” and Jarmusch devotees are going to feel under-nourished.

Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny play cops in an upper New York State town called Centerville, and all they really do is watch and comment, watch and comment, watch and comment.

Tilda Swinton plays the only truly cool character — an eccentric small-town samurai mortician.

Tom Waits plays a kind of Greek chorus character named Hermit Bob — a woods-dwelling hobo who provides despairing commentary now and then, especially toward the end. Steve Buscemi, RZA, Danny Glover and Caleb Landry Jones are typical Jarmusch-styled eccentrics (a snarly Trump fanatic with a dog named Rumsfeld, a wisdom-dispensing UPS delivery man, a kindly townie, and a gas-station owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of film and comic books, respectively).

I’m sorry to be panning. I’m a huge fan of Only Lovers Left Alive (which I only saw once but has gotten better and better the more I’ve thought about it) and Paterson. I had the feeling during tonight’s screening that Jarmusch wrote the script too quickly and hadn’t really thought things through. But the main problem is that his story and direction are just as lethargic as his characters.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (Summit, 5.17) “is a case of bigger but not better,” says a regional film critic pally. “The first Wick was a pleasant surprise. The second one (’17) was fine **, but didn’t really improve on the first.

“Now we have the third, which is so over-the-top it’s actually exhausting. Fight scene after fight scene, some truly gross-out moments (a sword rammed into a bad guy’s eye, heads exploding, etc.), and a body count that’s through the roof (must be something like 200 deaths).”

HE thought: John Wick: 200 Deaths isn’t a bad title.

“The film definitely has a sense of humor, and the sf-like elements (everything regarding the super criminal organization The Table) are fun, but overall the film, while entertaining, is also cringe-worthy. While watching it I couldn’t help thinking that if the action weren’t so obviously preposterous, John Wick 3 would deserve an NC-17 rating. And maybe it still does.

“Maybe the R rating points out, once again, how the MPAA goes soft on violence and hard on sex. All I know is, I wouldn’t want any kid of mine to see this film.”

** In HE’s humble opinion John Wick, Chapter 2 was not fine.

After last January’s dismaying Sundance credentials episode, I needed the emotional and psychological boost of my beloved pink-with-yellow-pastille badge, which the Cannes Film Festival press office been gracious enough to dispense for the last seven or eight years.

The feelings of comfort and affirmation that this pass bequeaths cannot and should not be minimized. Pink-with-yellow-dot doesn’t just put a smile on your face — it imprints a smile in your soul. A regular pink pass is fine — it just means having to wait in line for 30 to 40 minutes, and is much better than a dreaded blue or yellow or (God forbid) Cannes market badge. But pink-with-yellow-dot means you can stroll in at the last minute, which allows you to file at your nearby apartment until just before a screening begins.

Who am I if not a pink-with-yellow-pastille guy? What am I? What is the sum total of my decades of filing, reporting and dispensing gut-instinct observations if not this? Life is hard, but it’s a lot less arduous if you’re wearing one of these babies.

Daniel Craig pulled a Tom Cruise last week in Jamaica, injuring his ankle during a running scene and consequently throwing the shoot of Bond 25 (aka Shatterhand) out of whack.

What was your first thought after hearing of this? Right — you wondered how old Craig is (51) and if that might have been a slight factor. The answer is “it might well have been.” Craig is squarely middle-aged and not even within flirting distance of being “old”. But you do wither slightly at that age. Running, fighting and leaping-wise, the optimum window is between your late teens and mid to late 40s. After that an actor is probably better off playing “M” or “Q.”

Genes, luck and discipline are always key factors in shooting action scenes, but one or more of these probably failed Craig, who’s been injured three or four times before while Bonding. Biology, man. You can run but you can’t hide.

After the fall Craig “was in quite a lot of pain and was complaining about his ankle,” according to a source who spoke to The Independent‘s George Simpson. “As you’d expect he was also pretty angry that it had happened. He threw his suit jacket on the ground in sheer frustration.”

Craig: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! I’ve done this kind of action scene dozens of times before. What the hell happened?”

Sean Connery was 52 or so when he shot in last Bond film, Never Say Never Again (’83). Pierce Brosnan was the same age when he hung up his Bond spurs in ’05. Roger Moore was 57 or 58 when he did his final Bond, A View to a Kill (’85). They were all pushing it. They all tasted a bit of luck.

HE says the ideal Bond actor should be in his early 30s (the rugged-looking Connery was 32 when he made Dr. No) to late ’40s, depending on the breaks. After that it starts (I say “starts”) to become a game of roulette mixed with careful choreographic planning.

Catch 22 producer, co-director and costar George Clooney to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg: “The studios are less and less telling the kinds of stories that I like to tell. Mid-range or even small budget. You know, Warner Bros. isn’t going to make Good Night, and Good Luck now; they’re not going to make Michael Clayton, quite honestly, now. So [projects like those] are going to end up at Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or Apple or one of those places.”

Has Hollywood Elsewhere seen even a frame of Catch 22 (Hulu, 5.17), much less all six episodes? Nope, and with the Cannes Film Festival beginning later today, there isn’t much time to do so. 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, 75% on Metacritic.