Before Michelle Yeoh was introduced as the guest of honor at the Kering Women in Motion dinner in Cannes, festival director Thierry Frémaux recalled Yeo’s first visit to Cannes in 2002. I reminisced. palm d’or.
Yeo was navigating an award season that culminated in her recent win for Best Actress in Everything Everywhere All at Once, so I stopped by her table on Sunday and asked her 20 years. I asked her if her previous trip to Cannes gave her a formative perspective on presenting the awards.
Yo lightened up. “We were just talking about this!” she said, referring to her tablemates, including actors Brie Larson and Paul Dano, who are jurors at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Yeo almost knew what he was getting into when he accepted Fremaux’s invitation to join the jury in 2002, not long after the release of his hit “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Said he didn’t know. “You’re going to see two or three movies a day, so it’s very nerve-wracking and it’s not easy,” she said. “Sometimes she takes up to three hours, which isn’t always easy to handle.”
Though head judge David Lynch proved to be a stabilizing force for the group, “David was always cool and that set the tone,” she said, but director Gaspar Noé’s The experience of watching movies like the harrowing Irreversible, but the Holocaust drama The Pianist (Palm Award-winning) was more eventful than Yeo expected. Overcome rides like roller coasters. “
She gasped at the memory. “Whew! It was a little too emotional. Maybe I was too young at the time and didn’t have enough experience,” Yeo, now 60, said. “But I don’t think he agreed to serve on another jury after that.”
Is there anything I can do to convince her to come back? I had an interesting hypothesis about what would happen if Frémaux offered her the position of jury president.
“If Thierry wants me to do something, I will do it,” Yeo said. “That’s a very simple answer.”
Kering’s dinner turned out to be a fun night for the actress, after which Larson stood in a chair and danced with Larson as a saxophonist played nearby. But Yeo said her most important soiree recently was the Hong Kong dinner celebrating her Oscar win, attended by celebrities from the Asian film world where she launched her career, including Chow Yun-Fat and Donnie Yen. rice field.
“The most important thing is that you have to admit where you come from,” she said. “Being from Malaysia is another thing, but my career actually started in Hong Kong, where I learned tech and started traveling. It was important to convey how much it meant to me.”
They all remain friends, she added. “Sometimes if you’re a true friend, you don’t have to call every day and see each other all the time, right?” she smiled. “It just picks up where it left off.”
