James Gray was on the plane during the opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival.
He did not hear Volodymyr Zelensky's speech, but he read extracts from it.
The former actor turned president of Ukraine knows his classics.
To evoke the destruction that his country undergoes, he quoted Robert Duvall in
Apocalypse Now
:
"I like to breathe the smell of napalm in the early morning."
Gray discovered Francis Ford Coppola's film in a basement cinema at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan in 1981. He never got over it.
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“All war is a form of spectacle,
explains the American filmmaker a few hours before the official screening of
Armageddon Time
, his new feature film in competition.
I was invited to a festival in 2019 for the 40th anniversary of
Apocalypse Now.
I love Francis and I participated in a debate with him.
I asked him a silly question: “Do you think we learned the lessons of Vietnam?”
He replied: “Of course not, look at Iraq.”
I'm quite pessimistic...
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