CANNES DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Andy Garcia had been trying to make his self-written neo-noir, Diamond, for years when he watched Phantom Thread and the pieces of the puzzle came together. ‘I saw this young lady in Phantom Thread, and I said, ‘I’m not making the movie without her’,’ he enthuses about Vicky Krieps to Hollywood Authentic. Krieps plays the movie’s femme fatale, Sharon Cobbs, the enigmatic wife of a murdered billionaire, who is the prime suspect in the case. Sharon brings in period-obsessed PI Joe Diamond (Garcia) to help unravel the truth, with Krieps bringing her disarming and intriguing read to a genre staple. Sharon and Joe dance around each other romantically as Joe uncovers the facts. Garcia is captivated by the actor in real life (‘I love you, Vicky Krieps!’ he says warmly when he sees her as we sit down before the movie premieres) and relates how she inadvertently made him wait for an answer on whether she would take the role. ‘It took a while for her to read it, she made me suffer for a couple of months,’ he smiles.
‘I blame my agent,’ Krieps jokes. ‘But seriously, when it came to me I was a mother of two, you know?’ I was looking after them alone. I was really overwhelmed in my life, generally. And then I watched Ocean’s 11 with my best friend. She kept going on about Andy and after a while, I was thinking, ‘Wait…I think I have an email – a script!’ I read it the same night. And then I replied very fast. It was so well-written. The dialogue was like Billy Wilder. I hadn’t read anything like that, which is why I told him, ‘I’m coming, with whatever – or without – money. I don’t care. Tell me when.’’
Krieps, Garcia says, is incapable of delivering a false note, even within a genre piece. ‘I took it very seriously,’ she says of the process. ‘How could I – someone who’s a cineaste – in full respect of the genre and of all of Hollywood, and all the beauty and the light, bring something from today to this woman? I bring something where a woman doesn’t care if she’s liked or not. I was trying to make her mysterious but also someone who could totally exist for herself.’ The appreciation is mutual between Krieps and actor/writer/director/producer/composer Garcia. ‘I’ve worked with a few actor-directors and there was no conflict between the actor and the director with Andy,’ Krieps nods. ‘He made us feel so free. We had no time and no money, but we felt like: ‘We have all the time in the world. Should we do it again? Let’s do it again.’
Though the film is an entertaining, self-aware potboiler with murder, wiseguys and a jazzy soundtrack, Krieps says that the theme playing, like a muted trumpet, under all of it; is love. ‘This film is so unique, because of all these genres, and all that beautiful construction – but at the centre it’s all love. It’s Andy’s love for the story, the story of life itself, music, art. It’s the love for this universe. Diamond is about the love for what has gone, the love for what is here. And all the scenes are good because the people we are working with, there’s love and respect for the other person’s work.’ It’s cinema that is a world away from content churned out by an algorithm, she says, mentioning a streaming service that she did not care to work with. ‘They said the film has to be so that you can watch it on multiple screens. And you have to speak in a way that you can still understand it, but at double speed. I said, ‘Fuck you’. I couldn’t do that.’
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Diamond premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival
