As Carole Myer attends her last Cannes Film Festival before taking an early retirement, Nick Roddick talks to her about her legendary career
Carole Myer pauses for a moment while she considers the question. The question was: "What do you think you're going to miss about Cannes?" She gives a characteristic sideways movement of the head, partly arch but more emphatic, the verbal equivalent of putting an asterisk at the beginning of a sentence.
"I have a theory I'm not going to miss any of it," Carole says finally. As always, her timing is perfect. She joined the British Film Institute 20 years ago, on 1 April 1976. And she'll be leaving the business at the end of the autumn. Her contract with The Sales Company runs out on 1 November and she has decided to call it a day. Except that 1 November is the last day of Mifed, so she has agreed to stay on for a fortnight to wrap things up. Pity, really; if she had left on the earlier date, her career in movies would have run from April Fool's Day 1976 to Halloween 1996.
I find it very difficult to think of Cannes without Carole - the scourge of the trade press; the woman who has sent journalists whimpering from the lobbies of screening rooms when they tried to nip out and write their reviews before the end of the film; the woman I still refuse to believe sat there silently while Palace's Nik Powell sold Sweden twice.
So why is she leaving the business, well short of statutory retirement age? "I feel I've done everything in my area of cinema that I'm interested in doing," she says, "which is taking interesting movies - even better, interesting movies by first-time directors - and making them so well-known that people will want to distribute them in cinemas." The cinema bit is crucial. Carole, it should be said, does not possess a television, although she thinks she might buy one for her retirement.
The market is also getting a little middle-aged. "I would love some new distributors to come along," she says. "I always seem to be dealing with the selfsame ones. Quality cinema is the one area which has held up recently. The audience for my kind of movies is bigger than it's ever been - it's almost embarrassing!
"I think Land and Freedom has some of the highest figures for any Ken Loach film ever, although it is very uneven. I think Persuasion has worked almost everywhere. But as a whole, distribution in the area of quality movies has become very automatic."
Last year in Cannes, Myer caused a minor furore by scheduling a Women Only press screening of Antonia's Line (even the producer was denied access). Since then, the film has built and built, culminating in a Best Foreign Picture Oscar in March and a US gross of $2.5 million, surely the highest ever for a Dutch film. And yet distributors still call her up, she says, to ask how they should promote it.
But then, it is Carole Myer's sense of responsibility to distributors that has made her legendary. She is, for instance, disappointed by the commercial failure of Butterfly Kiss. "It seems that there is not a market for Lesbian serial-killer movies," she jokes, "but I didn't sell it for high prices, so no one went bankrupt."
She contrasts that with a certain high-profile Cannes title from last year whose sellers did, indeed, use the Festival buzz to massage the prices, getting "between 16 and 20 times the price I got. And it did about the same," she notes.
The tendency for majors and mini-majors to snatch up hot new talent after a festival success may be all well and good for the filmmakers, she adds, but it's hell for the distributors. "Take Jane Campion," she says. "Those distributors who bought and worked with Sweetie and An Angel at My Table would barely have been able to afford The Piano - and they almost certainly won't get Portrait of a Lady."
I sense in talking to Carole, quite apart from her understandable weariness of markets, an almost irreducible conflict between wanting to support the films she cares for, and wanting to play fair with the people who will take a financial - and, in every sense of the word, personal - risk in distributing them. That, more than anything else, I think, may be the reason for her deciding to take an early retirement, despite all the earnest determination to travel, go to exhibitions and attend courses in this or that...
It will be hard to do without her non-stop flow of sharp, funny observations. A mutual friend tells a story about deciding to have an early night and being woken at 11.30 by a call from Carole. "I thought: How am I going to wake up and talk?" says the person (no 'he', no 'she', no clues). "And then I realised I didn't have to. She'd talk for half an hour anyway."
We'll all miss the flow, the enthusiasms, the sheer love of films. Think back on the movies Myer has sold: The Draughtsman's Contract, The Refecting Skin, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Crying Game, The Snapper, Caro diario, Land and Freedom, The Van... That, after all, is where it started.
"I arrived in London in September 1968," she says, "leaving Chicago, where the Mayor was beating up demonstrators, on my way to Russia. But the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, so I stayed in London. I thought, being American, I knew everything about cinema. Then a friend had a spare ticket for The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice in the Ozu retrospective at the National Film Theatre. It was the most Jewish movie I'd ever seen, all about family and food. I came out starving for the flavour of green tea over rice."
And films in general.
