CANNES DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

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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.’

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Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Diamond premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival

CANNES DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

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During the end credits of Andy Garcia’s new film – in which he produced/directed, took the lead and composed the music – he thanks his daughter, Danielle (who also appears in the movie), for asking him to help with her English homework. The genesis of creating a neo-noir following a period-obsessed gumshoe, Joe Diamond, as he investigates the death of a billionaire and resists the 21st century was a Raymond Chandler assignment for Danielle 20 years ago. Garcia has always loved film noir (and been in films set in the period, including The Untouchables and Dead Again), and discovered a story had been marinating in him for years. ‘I started improvising this character. It was like, ‘Where did that voice come out of me? I didn’t know I had that voice’,’ he tells Hollywood Authentic on the roof terrace of the Marriott in Cannes where he is debuting Joe Diamond. ‘I think we got a ‘B’ on the report card for the homework, but the first thing that came out of me is still in the movie. And then I thought maybe there’s a movie with this guy.’ 

Garcia spent years noodling with Diamond’s characterisation and his rejection of the modern world – he lives a fully analog life despite the Waymo cars and robot deliveries that he runs into around LA. As a Fedora-wearing PI with an office in the Bradbury Building and a 1940 Plymouth Coupe, Joe may be out of step with selfies and TikTok, but he can crack a case using good old fashioned detective work and nous. ‘He’s like Batman. He has a Batcave, which is where he lives, and he’s got one suit, and he’s got his Batcar. Why is he the way he is? I didn’t know what it was until I had this dream. I woke up in the middle of the night and I was crying in my sleep. I immediately wrote ‘the only thing worse than crying yourself to sleep is crying in your sleep’.  And that haunted me. Of course, I’m enamoured with the genre, and the photographic elements and the style of it all, but that was the key.’ 

Garcia drew inspiration from photographers such as Fan Ho and Herman Leonard, along with the work of cinematographers Nestor Almendros, Conrad Hall and Gordon Willis, as well as Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. And he made LA, a city he’d known since 1978 when he moved there as a young actor, a character in itself with iconic locations such as the Clifton Cafeteria, Angel’s Flight, Central Market and the now-closed Cole’s French Dip and Original Pantry Cage woven into the tale. And while the case at the heart of the story drives the narrative, it is the trauma that Joe lives with that provides the twists. No spoilers on the grief at the heart of the characterisation, but that case involves a murdered billionaire and his beautiful wife, Sharon Cobb, who is the assumed perp by LAPD detective led by Brendan Fraser. ‘When I was thinking about making the movie I wondered who am I going to make the movie with?’ Garcia says. ‘And then I saw this young lady in Phantom Thread, and I said, ‘I’m not making the movie without her’.’

Tapping Vicky Krieps as Sharon, Bill Murray as Joe’s barkeep manager, Danny Huston as an oily lawyer, Rosemary DeWitt as a mysterious romantic prospect and Dustin Hoffman as a joke-cracking, noodle-slurping pathologist, Garcia scraped independent financing together (‘I could never get any support from traditional studios or streamers’) to make his movie in 25 days over 40 locations and 59 sets. As if he didn’t already have enough to do, he also co-wrote the music with jazz legend Arturo Sandoval, and personally performed the Diamond theme. Though it’s period specific and loaded with noir touches and muted trumpets, Diamond is still very much its own thing, says Garcia. ‘It was very important not to fall into the trap – all of us – of ‘this is film noir, and we’re going to smoke the cigarette, and am I a villain or will I be a gentleman or whatever?’ There has to be a true humanity.’ As an actor/director he felt at ease giving his cast what he calls ‘a sacred place for us to play’. ‘Once I know what the composition is, I don’t need to go back to the monitor and interrupt our flow, and say, ‘Let me look at that take, and see how you’re doing’. I’ve worked in movies, even with actors that aren’t directing, who do a take, and then they get up and look at the take. When the actor comes back I go, ‘hey, it’s me and you here. It’s not about what you see in yourself. You’re breaking the energy of what we’re doing here’.  It’s an insecurity. It’s very important that we’re going to discover this thing moment to moment, take to take. It needs to be alive.’

A recurring theme in the film is Joe’s dismissal of social media, despite being an urban legend on it – with people he encounters during his investigation understanding him through the lens of TikTok and wanting selfies. ‘The social media world, that whole thing – somehow, it does tank your life,’ Garcia muses. ‘It’s the death of tranquillity in a way. You have to make a choice. Do you abandon it all together, or use it in a constructive way to promote a piece of work? People are starting to make movies to watch on their iPhones. Things have to happen in the first three minutes of the story, or else people will turn it off. But this movie was definitely designed for a big screen.’

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Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Diamond premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival