The busiest actor in Cannes this year is a man considerably more famous for his artistry on the football field than on screen.
Eric Cantona has an impressive three films in the festival, with the French soccer legend and Manchester United hero acting in two and the subject of another.
Cantona has now bean an actor 30 years, longer than he was a footballer — and with numerous visits to Cannes (most notably in 2009 for Ken Loach’s “Looking for Eric”).
Speaking to Variety, he discusses how his passion for film first began in the cinemas of Marseille, why he went straight into acting after he retired from sport and the French actor who would help give him the confidence he needed at the start.
I wanted to have something special, something that could be a heritage for my family and for my kids — something more artistic. And I think this one is much more artistic than the others.
I always had a passion for any kind of art. And cinema, of course, is the seventh art. So yes, I was passionate. I grew up in Marseille. It was a time when you had a cinema in one small part of the city and another one in another small part of the city. But we had a great cinema in my area, and they showed a lot of Bruce Lee films, which we really enjoyed. And at the end of the movie we were all fighting together. Bruce Lee is still one of the people I admire. He was of course a great actor, but a great philosopher.
The first movie I saw was “The Towering Inferno” with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. That was the first. My father took us all together. And I also watched a lot of movies on VHS.
Yeah! And it took for the people to accept that someone coming from another world could express himself as an actor, because they have strong image of me and sometimes they cannot accept it. And it takes for the audience to accept that you can do something else. Now I’m confident every time I go on set, even with great actors, actresses and great directors and also now the people have accepted that I can be an actor, which is great.
Source: variety.com