For Louis Garrel, the centre of the universe is located at the Cannes film festival. “It’s like a particle accelerator, like that place in Switzerland,” he says. “Your disappointments there are bigger, and your joy is bigger.” He is calling from Paris, where he is tinkering with the edit of his latest film The Innocent; his fourth feature as a director but the first to get an airing in Cannes’s galactic-sized Louis Lumière auditorium. At the time of our conversation he’s got 10 days to nail down the finer details: “It’s like being back at school. I used to leave everything to the last minute.”
Garrel – still best known outside France for being one corner of a preposterously sexy love triangle in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers – is an aquiline-nosed, tousle-haired French film blue blood; the son of Nouvelle Vague stalwart Philippe Garrel and actor Brigitte Sy, and the godson of The 400 Blows star Jean-Pierre Léaud. But even if he understands “the way the game is played” at Cannes, he still doesn’t feel like an insider: “I get the jitters before going every time. So right now I’ve got the jitters.” Today, he’s fretting over how the sound mix will play in the giant auditorium. “It’s a good kind of pressure,” he says, then hoots with sharp laughter.
