Don't wave it around Depardieu, you might lose it to a desperate director. Photograph: AP
Cannes veteran Menahem Golan is back in town today to announce a new project. It's a Holocaust comedy called Le Grand Festival that will star Gerard Depardieu as the director of a music festival in a spa town somewhere in Austria. The film is adapted from the novel by Aharon Appelfeld about a group of middle-class Jews adrift on the eve of the war.
Golan is one of those figures whose names have long since passed into Cannes lore. In his pomp, the ex-Cannon boss was famous for signing contracts with Jean-Luc Godard and Sylvester Stallone on the back of napkins. By coincidence, one of his old collaborators is also in Cannes. Earlier this week, Barbet Schroeder unveiled his brilliant documentary, Terror's Advocate, about lawyer Jacques Verges, who defended Klaus Barbie and was friends with Pol Pot.
Verges may have been difficult to deal with, but he wasn't a patch on Golan (who produced Schroeder's 1987 film Barfly.) For some reason, early in preproduction, myth has it that Schroeder confronted Golan with a chainsaw in a bid to persuade him to release the promised funds. The anecdote has been embellished endlessly and exists in many different versions.
As Schroeder told me, there was indeed an "incident", but - contrary to myth - he wasn't threatening Golan. "I didn't have time to find a lawyer because we were in a real hurry to save the movie. He (Golan) was not respecting his word and I had to force him to respect his word and so I chose the law firm Black and Decker. I threatened to cut off my finger. Before doing that, I had injected myself with something very strong and powerful so that for 10 hours I couldn't feel anything."
Schroeder had it all arranged - he was going to lop off one of his fingers, hold a press conference with star Mickey Rourke and writer Charles Bukowski to tell the world of Golan's perfidy and then rush off to hospital to get his finger sewn back on. "The threat was enough, but I had the saw. When I went to the shop to buy it, I was asked what it was to cut. I said some precious ivory."
Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, no deals have been struck on the Croisette this year with the firm Black and Decker.
