The Cannes Film Festival made quite a few enemies this year. After all, it rejected filmmakers such as Mike Leigh, Carlos Reygadas, Luca Guadagnino, Lazslo Nemes, Mia Hansen-Love, Jennifer Kent, Paolo Sorrentino, and Tomas Vinterberg, not to mention the four Netflix titles it had accepted but then had to rescind due to its ongoing spar with the streaming giant; films by Alfonso Cuaron, Paul Greengrass, Orson Welles, and Jeremy Saulnier were all given the boot.
Safe for the Netflix films, all of which were greeted with positive notices, the stuff Cannes head Thierry Fremaux rejected this year turned out to be duds on the festival circuit. All the aforementioned films were greeted with lackluster reviews at Venice. All except Jacques Audiard's "The Sisters Brothers," a western that has been getting great reviews and seems, based on today's news, to have probably been probably rejected by Fremaux.
All of this is rather strange, considering Audiard won the Palme d’Or in 2015 for his film “Dheepan,” won the Grand Prix for “A Prophet” in 2010, and won the Best Screenplay Award in 1996 for “A Self Made Hero.” His 2012 film “Rust and Bone” was also met with excellent reviews when it premiered in Cannes competition.
A new interview with IndieWire has Audiard rather bitter about the way "The Sisters Brothers" was treated by Fremaux, or, at the very least, he's hinting about it: “I don’t feel a need to be there,” Audiard said about Cannes. When he was asked what would happen if Fremaux offered him a slot in the future, going on to say “I will refuse it. I don’t really care if I go to Cannes or not.”
He continued, “I don’t want to be in competition anywhere.”
He went on to explain his views on Netflix, “It’s always difficult to make films. The world is changing and I don’t know if people still want films. That’s the problem with Netflix. Are we talking about theaters or cinema when it’s on the tablet? That’s not cinema.”