Festival president since 1984, Pierre Viot came to the cinema by
chance - via jobs as a town planner and a building inspector
Regrets?” The word is Piaf (or Aznavour if you're a child of the 70s), but the delivery is pure Jouvet - the Louis Jouvet of Marcel Carné's Drôle de drame. “Regrets? You're asking me about regrets?”
Indeed I am. Specifically, does he have any regrets, in among all the euphoria about the plans that have come together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival - any regrets about ideas that got away?
“Of course I do,” says Pierre Viot, Pre-sident of the Festival International du Film, not sounding especially regretful. “That's how it is with the festival. The real life,” he adds with a more than usually conspiratorial chuckle, “takes place behind the scenes.”
Pressed, Viot reveals a scheme for a night-time nautical display on the Baie de Cannes, that temporary parking lot for flash cabin cruisers, in which scenes from great movies would have been projected onto the sails of boats. “There would have been music and fireworks and everything,” he says. “It was going to cost five million francs, but I said to the person who suggested it: 'I'm not giving you that. In fact, I'm not even giving you one franc. But sort out your own financing and you can do it.' He almost did, but it finally fell through about a fortnight ago.”
Viot took over from Robert Favre Le Bret as president of the festival in 1984, and it is clear that, for him, the pleasures and the satisfactions - as much of the job as a whole as of its landmark 50th year - outweigh the disappointments. So what, I ask, has given him the most pleasure among all the high-profile events that have been arranged to mark the anniversary?
He hesitates for the briefest of moments and then beams like a schoolboy. “Adjani!” he chuckles, focusing on this year's President of the Jury. “I got a great deal of pleasure from the way in which she accepted. My greatest pleasure is in getting to know people. One conclusion I have come to is that the better known they are, the easier they are to work with. There is often a simplicity in the relations we have with the top people, a sense of sharing, that you don't get with the others.”
It's easy to imagine Viot enjoying getting to know people: he has a decidedly twinkly quality about him, in marked contrast to the patrician authority of Gilles Jacob, whose annual press conference peroration is an eloquently crafted assessment of just where the year's festival belongs in the spectrum of cinematic culture. Viot, on the other hand, is happy to admit that, while he likes films, he is no cinephile.
Indeed, he was a town-planning officer and public buildings inspector until 1973, when he suddenly found himself thrust into the world of cinema. Typically, he uses a phrase adapted from Asterix - “Je suis tombé dans le marmite du cinéma” - to describe the process.
“My main interest used to be in how towns were laid out and the way that people lived in them,” he declares.
“I didn't know anything about cinema. Oh, of course, I used to go to the Cinémathèque when I was a student and I can still remember the big retrospective of Soviet cinema. But the nouvelle vague was something I lived through as a regular cinemagoer - as someone quite outside the world of cinema. And then, by chance, I was asked if I wanted to run the Centre National du Cinéma.”
It was, he admits, not an idea that had been at the top of his wish-list. “I said, 'What on earth is the Centre National du Cinéma?' And they said, 'Oh, it's an organisation for cinema professionals.' So I said, 'Well, I'm not a professional, but I do like the cinema.'”
Viot stayed at the CNC until the end of 1984. By then, Favre Le Bret was getting on in years and the industry had grown to quite like the former town-planner. So the minister said, “Listen, we're looking for a president for the Festival de Cannes…”
“Oh!” said Viot. “Ooh-la-la! Then, when I thought about it, I thought Cannes would be rather a nice little number: you'd meet foreign delegations during the day, the beach would be just nearby; and, in the evening, you'd go and see films. It couldn't be that bad…”
Although he soon found the truth to be slightly different, Viot is quietly proud that, whereas he was appointed to run the CNC under Pompidou, it was Socialist Minister of Culture Jack Lang who asked him to take over Cannes. “I suppose I made the transition,” he says. “They knew I was someone who could be guaranteed to be loyal but, at the same time, would be completely independent.”
That same independence shows up in the occasional lack of reverence of which he is capable towards the French cultural flagship he runs. “Listen,” he said when I spoke to him this time last year, “when it first started in the 40s, the Cannes Film Festival was pretty much a tourist event. If you came with a film, you got a prize. They needed to get people back to the Côte d'Azur after the war…”
Not so now. The festival has a year-round staff of 10 rising to over 600 in May, not to mention a fleet of 60 top-of-the-line Renault limos, plus deals with Air France, Cartier, Canal+ and a host of other major corporations. And Viot clearly never allows his natural sense of humour to get in the way of his responsibilities as president.
It was he, for example, who finalised the deal with Cartier to sponsor the Sunday gala which will be the focus of the 50th anniversary celebrations on 11 May, having put out feelers to a number of other top French companies, including Dior.
“Cartier were the ones who offered the most money and the most enthusiasm, so they're the ones who got it,” he says, neatly summing up the balance that lies behind the whole event. “That's the way it is with Cannes.”
