Sebastian Stan On ‘Fjord’ And Shooting ‘The Batman II’ In London

EXCLUSIVE: Sebastian Stan is that rare breed of actor who uses his star superpower to help get movies such as Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner Fjord made – a film that explores topics of religious intolerance and violence towards children.

As a thespian, he will do whatever’s necessary for the character. For Fjord, he’s almost unrecognizable with his hair shaved down to his scalp and unflattering costumes that could’ve been made outta potato sacks.

Soon, he says, he’ll be in London (over summer)  for Matt Reeves’ The Batman: Part II, where he’ll play “many roles in this one”.

He’s referring to the character Harvey Dent, who starts off as Gotham’s crime-fighting District Attorney who descends into madness when underworld figure Sal “Boss” Maroni hurls acid in his face scarring the left side, hence the Two-Face moniker he takes up. 

Having mastered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this marks his first foray into WB’s Batman DC world.

”I’m excited, I’m nervous and trying to keep surprising myself,” he says of taking on Two-Face and working with the hair and makeup teams who have devised how his disfigurement will look.

We’ve met a few times, notably, here and at Telluride when he was travelling with The Apprentice film where he portrayed a young Donald Trump, a portrayal  that garnered him a much deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination.

I can well imagine that Neon, which has Fjord in the U.S., will have the actor, and Renate Reinsve, who plays his wife in the film that’s set in small-town Norway [some might say small-minded Norway, parts of it anyway], on the next awards season cycle. In reality, the next awards season began Saturday night when the prizes were being handed out in the Grand Theatre Auditorium Louis Lumière.

Stan plays a Romanian family man who travels with his five children to live in his wife’s Norwegian hometown.

Their strong Christian beliefs become an issue with some locals and they’re accused of violence towards their children who are removed and placed with foster parents.

Having knowledge of fostering and violence towards children [my wife was once a communications director with the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children], the movie struck a chord; I was totally captivated by it.

Stan says he thought it was “very brave of the jury to recognize the film in terms of just the questions it raises — this divisiveness, this inability to agree on anything and to me the film really speaks towards doubt, but not necessarily in a negative way, in a positive way that perhaps we should invite more doubt into our lives, not necessarily doubt in other people but doubting ourselves a bit and our own mindsets and our own belief systems — we could be wrong about other people. We just need to get away from extremism because it doesn’t work.“

When he came to live in the U.S. with his mother, having been raised in Romania, he was the age of the two older children in Fjord. “I was twelve and I have the most empathy for the children in the movie. All they want is to fit in and to be accepted. But when you’re an immigrant and you’re a kid, and you’ve got society telling you one thing and your parents are telling you another thing, where’s room for you [the kid] left in any of that?”

Hopefully, after he completes The Batman: Part II, he’ll take on another powerful, socially aware picture.

I always enjoy the traditions and panoply of Cannes Closing Ceremony and being inside the Lumière is such fun. It’s where I saw  all the Competition films, and a few that were shown Out of Competition.

Quite a few film critics have declared the 79th festival a rotten year. I call bullsh** on that, as does Tilda Swinton who presented Saturday night’s top trophy to Fjord.

She says that she read some commentary that it was supposedly a “bad year” and she refutes that suggestion. “No it isn’t. These films are so substantial and so specific,” she argues as we take in the view of the sea shimmering in the moonlight at the splendid cocktail party on the Majestic Beach.

This year’s films, Swinton continues “to my mind have been about difference and this is something that has become a certain taboo in a kind of mainstream culture, but it’s so important and this is exactly what Cannes is for.”

Each film, love ‘em or hate ‘em, reflect what’s going on in the world, I say. “Not only what’s going on in the world but what could go on in the world if we tried a little harder,” the Oscar-winning star delicately opines.

She looks over at people dancing while others stroll along the pier eating caviar canapés or small plates of roast lamb with potato purée and a selection of vegetables. “I think it’s really encouraging and people at this party are so full of hope tonight and it’s not just about filmmakers getting prizes, it’s about these sort of messages in bottles that we know are going to go out to cinema audiences around the world over the next year,” she notes.

“And by the way, we know, don’t we Baz, that young people are going more and more for the big screen experience,” she suggests “and they want to see these films, to argue and discuss with their friends.”

In her travels, Swinton has found that young people do not want to wait for the films to come onto their television screens, they want “the collective experience” of seeing them in film palaces upon release.

Also, she continues, the films honoured, “almost with no exception“ have got “what they used to call crossover appeal. They’re absolutely relatable. They’re big cinema and they’re big stories and they’re going to be good for people and that’s what art needs to be, right?”

We digress to talk about those familiar strains of the festival’s audio signature we hear before every premiere. It’s Aquarium from The Carnival of Animals written by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. “We are in an aquarium when we’re in there, “ she says,  her eyes dancing as she hums the melody.

“It’s magic. People talk about glamour in Cannes and I always say, “No that’s the glamour [the cinema], we’re all a bunch of bridesmaid’s dressed up for a wedding. The bride is the screen.”

I ask her if the future of cinema is safe?

“Cinema’s future is always safe because she’s so elastic, so malleable,” she reassures.

“There was a moment when sound came in and all the studios in the 1920s were shutting down because there was no way of recording film with sound and everybody talked about cinema dying. What happened? Adaptation. Then color came in, TV came in as did DVD, video, streaming. Cinema is not going anywhere,” she says slapping her hands together.

But isn’t AI a threat, I wonder?

”Well, we just have to do better than AI and I believe that art is our best bet in doing better than AI because humans make art and I believe humans can do better than AI in almost every capacity and certainly in the world of art, so we just have to do better,” she insists.

But she cautions that “as long as we make formulaic films that AI could do, we’re sunk. But films like these, the films that were honoured tonight are really particular, really messy and about the human experience, we’re safe. We’re seeing life on screen.”

Her film museum show Tilda Swinton – Ongoing which launched at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, just opened it in Athens, then heads to Warsaw in September and at some point it will visit the U.K and U.S.

The exhibition explores her collaborations with the likes of Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Saillard, Tim Walker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Almodóvar and the late Derek Jarman.

In fact, Swinton and I first met on the set of Jarman’s Caravaggio in 1985 and I remember Jarman saying I should meet and interview this “free spirit” called Tilda who happens to be a general’s daughter. 

I like that the general’s daughter is still a “free spirit.”

The party kicked off soon after the closing ceremony wrapped and kept firing itself up throughout the night. It wasn’t for Demi Moore, though. She scooted away before 11.

Zoe Saldaña and Penélope Cruz stopped by around midnight. I spotted Isabelle Huppert around 1am.

Around 2am, I remarked to a friend that that the dude in dark glasses, sporting a black leather jacket looked just like Rami Malek, and heck, it was Rami Malek, who was pretty darn good in Ira Sachs’ film The Man I Love.

Stellan Skarsgärd was there pretty much the whole night.

The Norwegian star says he had a good time on the jury observing that “when we weren’t agreeing we compromised.”

It was simple, he adds. “If we couldn’t agree we thought, well, we’ll give two awards,” although he says that they had to “seek permission from the powers that be” to honor two films, as in the case of the directors prize, where young up-and-coming Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the Spanish directors of La Bola Negra, were named best director as was “the old Wolf,” as he describes Fatherland’s Pawel Pawlikowski.

Similarly, in the thespian prizes, Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, the two actors from Lukas Dhont’s World War One drama, Coward shared the actor’s prize as did Virginie Esiri and Tao Okamoto for their beautifully performed roles in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s tremendously moving All Of A Sudden.

In July, Skarsgård begins shooting Apple’s new, as yet untitled, criminal adventure TV drama series with Dakota Fanning, the sister of Elle Fanning with whom he developed a close bond during the shooting of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which won last year’s Grand Prix at the 78th Cannes and the Oscar for Best International Film.

“I play a rich guy, probably rather shady,” he says with wry understatement.

The show shoots in the U.S. and in France. “We have direct flights from Stockholm  to New York, which is very useful,” he advises.

When I saw Penélope Cruz, she spoke of the youthfulness of the directors of La Bola Negra.

I saw that also with  Emmanuel Macchia, who won the best actor prize with Valentin Campagne for Coward.

“Never, never acted before,” 20 year-old Macchia from Charleroi, near Lille, says. He was studying landscape architecture when Dhont discovered him. 

Macchia says that he now has an appetite for acting, as long as it’s to tell stories with “a good message.”

He had no sense at all that he could win. “The other actors are so famous and so good, and for me to win I cannot imagine this.”

Now there are agents circling, hoping to sign him up. 

His parents accompanied him to Cannes. “They are surprised I won, they can’t believe it. Just like me. I still can’t believe it.”

As I waited to chat with the young Belgian a producer was pitching him an idea about a film set in the Boer War and I thought: this kid needs an agent fast.

The 79th Cannes Film Festival was either my 42nd or my 43rd, math not being my strong point. A few of us left the Closing Night party and chatted in a hotel until 6am or so.

Among many other things to ponder, we wondered, or rather I wondered, what would become of Emmanuel Macchia in four decades? Will he survive? I have to believe in the hope that Tilda Swinton desires for cinema’s future.

Otherwise, to put it bluntly, we’re f***ed.