Evene.fr have posted a short but very good new interview with Nicole, in which she talks about her directors and her work as an actress. It’s in French, so I’ve posted the original French version, plus a loosely translated (by Babelfish and quickly edited by me) English version below.

Alors que la star a deux films présentés à Cannes cette année, dont ‘The Paperboy’ de Lee Daniels, en compétition officielle ce jeudi 24 mai et qu’elle qualifie de très “sexuel”, Nicole Kidman a accepté de nous décrire son travail avec les réalisateurs qui ont marqué sa carrière.

La star australienne est présente à Cannes pour accompagner en compétition The Paperboy de Lee Daniels (Precious), et Hemingway and Gellhorn de Philip Kaufman, hors compétition. Nicole Kidman avait été huée en ouverture du festival il y a vingt ans dans Horizons lointains de Ron Howard, avant d’y triompher quelques années plus tard avec Prête à tout (de Gus Van Sant, 1995), qui a été un grand tournant de sa carrière. On la verra bientôt dans Stoker de Park Chan-wook et Grace de Monaco d’Olivier Dahan. Ce qui l’anime avant tout, ce ne sont ni les sujets, ni les cachets, mais le choix du réalisateur. Petit questionnaire à une grande actrice.

Qu’est-ce qui vient d’abord, dans votre décision d’accepter un projet : le scénario, le rôle, ou le metteur en scène ?
Le metteur en scène. Si je le rencontre et que la connexion s’établit, je fonce. Souvent, je signe avant même que le scénario soit écrit !

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The excellent Cannes Film Festival official website has already posted their videos from today’s photocall and press conference, as well as an interview with the cast and director. Unfortunately embedding is not available, so hop on over to the official Paperboy page at the Cannes website to watch them all.

Nicole and her The Paperboy co-stars Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, John Cusack and Macy Gray, plus director Lee Daniels all attended the photocall for their movie earlier this morning in Cannes. It was great to see the much-talked about cast all together! Nicole looked gorgeous in a striking orange Antonio Berardi Fall 2012 dress – I love this look on her! It’s great to see her wearing something bold, different yet still elegant.

Zillions of photos are going to be popping up throughout the day, so I am going to hold off adding anything to our Gallery just yet. Below is a preview photo, plus the first few HQs from the event as a preview of what’s to come. Lots, lots more will be added to the site later today, so keep checking back!

The Paperboy received it’s first screening at Cannes early this morning, and the reviews are coming in. It sounds like it has aroused a lot of controversy, but that was certainly to be expected! Everything I’ve read so far praises Nicole for her performance, which is exciting. And then of course there’s the pee-ing news! Read on for the first reviews, and check back throughout the day for more reviews as they come in …

Cannes 2012: The Paperboy – review

Nicole Kidman’s performance is To Die For in Lee Daniels’s gripping, scary and queasily funny Florida noir

A heady, humid swamp fever rises from Lee Daniels’s violent and black-comic Florida noir The Paperboy, based on the thriller by Pete Dexter: a lazy, funny tone co-exists with menace, and Nicole Kidman gives her best performance since To Die For. Race, sex, journalism, publishing and 60s America are all part of the mix – The Help was never like this – and Daniels keeps it bubbling. This gripping, scary and queasily funny picture nurtures a dark threat which lurks like one of its gators just below the surface.

Apart from everything else, The Paperboy is about family dysfunction: Scott Glenn plays WW, a smalltown Florida newspaper publisher whose louche son Ward (Matthew McConaughey), having gone into the family business, has just come in from Miami on a mission to write a massive story about a miscarriage of justice on their doorstep. Convicted felon Hillary Van Wetter, played by a horribly sleazy and bloated John Cusack, faces the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. Ward and his colleague Yardley (David Oyelowo) – a black man whose smooth British accent cows the racist locals – figure they can crack this case wide open, and Ward’s excitable kid brother Jack, played by Zac Efron, has offered to be their driver.

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Nicole and her The Paperboy co-stars and director appeared on French talk show Le Grand Journal earlier today to talk about their film. If you can understand French, then it’s a fantastic, long interview. If not, then the French voiceover is slightly too loud to be able to hear much of the English unfortunately. We can see her get embarrassed by the large picture of Charlotte displayed on one of the screens though! Maybe one of our French speaking fans can give us a quick lowdown on what was said. Nevertheless, have a watch below.

I will add screencaptures from the interview in the coming days.

Thanks to our forum news poster extraordinaire thehours_fan for the alert to this.

Power Couple, Covering War (And Waging Their Own)

Before Christiane Amanpour, before Ann Garrels, before Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, there was Martha Gellhorn, one of the first great female war correspondents.

From the Spanish Civil War through Vietnam, she covered every major conflict of the day. But Gellhorn’s reputation as a journalist was sometimes overshadowed by her marriage to one of the great American writers, Ernest Hemingway.

HBO has made a film about Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. The movie puts the spotlight back on the lady in question, a striking figure — leggy, smart and impassioned.

In 1983, a British TV interviewer posed this loaded question to Gellhorn, then 75 and still gorgeous: “I.F. Stone once described governments as comprised entirely of liars and nothing they say should ever be believed.”

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BEST-SELLING Stourbridge author S J Watson has spoken of his excitement at the news that Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman is to star in the forthcoming film adaptation of his debut novel.

Moulin Rouge and Eyes Wide Shut star Kidman is to play amnesia patient Christine, who wakes each day to find she’s married to a stranger and she’s 20 years older than she remembers, in the movie version of Watson’s best-selling psychological thriller Before I Go To Sleep.

Bafta-winning director Rowan Joffe is directing the film which is currently in pre-production – with movie moguls Sir Ridley Scott and Tony Scott involved as executive producers.

Watson, who grew up in Wordsley, said: “The news that a star like Nicole Kidman will be starring in the film of my book just feels incredibly surreal – and incredibly exciting.

“I can’t wait to see what someone with her talent can bring to the role.”

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Cannes buyers have fallen under the spell of “Grace of Monaco,” Olivier Dahan’s drama toplining Nicole Kidman as thesp-turned-princess Grace Kelly.

Repped by L.A.-based shingle Inferno, “Grace of Monaco” pre-sold to Italy (Lucky Red), Australia (Entertainment One), Scandinavia (Scanbox), Germany (Square One), Latin America (Play Arte), Eastern Europe (Revolutionary Releasing) and Benelux (RVC).

“‘Grace’ has been very well received by buyers because they’ve been tracking the project since it’s been on the (Hollywood screenplay) Black List,” Inferno’s co-founder Jim Seibel tells Variety.

Seibel added, “‘Grace’ is on track to sell worldwide by the end of the market — the few remaining territories, including Spain, U.K. and Canada, are expected to be closed in the coming days.”

Dahan is best known for helming “La Vie en Rose,” the Edith Piaf biopic that earned Marion Cotillard an Oscar.

The 1962-set “Grace,” which is penned by Brit screenwriter Arash Amel, is produced by Pierre-Ange Le Pogam’s Stone Angels. The Gallic outfit is also producing Inferno-repped “Maggie,” Henry Hobson’s upscale genre pic based on John Scott 3′s script.

- Variety.com

‘Hemingway & Gellhorn’: Love is a battlefield in the HBO movie
Stormy lovers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn are played by Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the film directed by Phil Kaufman.

Most writers can only daydream about meeting — in the flesh — the characters they’ve imagined. But for Ernest Hemingway, one afternoon in Key West, Fla., it came close to actually happening. One day when the writer was in his mid-30s, hanging out at a local fisherman’s bar, he spotted a woman uncannily similar to the strong-willed, sexually liberated heartbreaker from his first novel.

“It’s as if, borne on the sea foam, she emerged — out of his own mind,” says director Phil Kaufman. “The woman of his dreams, of his own writing, came into his life.”

Kaufman is not musing idly; he’s recently completed directing a film about the relationship between the burly novelist and Martha Gellhorn, the intrepid war correspondent whom Kaufman sees as reminiscent of Lady Brett Ashley from “The Sun Also Rises.”

After Gellhorn walked into Sloppy Joe’s bar on that day in 1936, her life, like that of the novelist, was fundamentally altered. Hemingway — married at the time to Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife — urged Gellhorn, still establishing herself as a writer, to go with him to cover the Spanish Civil War. There the two began a romance, and they were later married in what proved to be a passionate but often difficult union.

As Kaufman sees it, Hemingway’s enthusiasm and support lighted a spark in Gellhorn, but that’s where things got complicated. “He ignited it,” says Nicole Kidman, who plays the journalist with an assertive spirit. “But once he ignited it, I don’t think he wanted that flame to grow.”

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Nicole Kidman plays 3rd Mrs. Hemingway

Actress Nicole Kidman says she loves plumbing someone else’s psyche. It’s the thing that keeps her coming back to acting, something she’s done for 28 years. “I think I still like getting lost in somebody else’s world,” she says.

“It’s just very rewarding. I don’t work as much now because I have a 12-year-old and a 3-year-old that require an enormous amount of time to raise them properly and to be there. So when I go and work, I’ve got to really feel it. I’ve got to feel the desire to tell the story.”

She felt the desire so keenly for her latest project, HBO’s “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” that she pleaded for the part.

Earlier she’d run into director Philip Kaufman at a fund-raiser. “His wife had recently passed, Rose, and he was still in an enormous of amount of pain and grief,” she recalls.

“He was there with his son. I was there and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, there’s Phil Kaufman.’ And I went over to him and I said, ‘How are you? You look like you’re in a lot of pain.’ And he went, ‘I am. I’m not good.’ Things that words don’t say, we just connected. And I loved him because he loved his wife so much and because you could just see the rawness.”

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