It's 2008. Another largely unplanned, career swerve and I’m now earning an artisanal sourdough crust as a screenwriter. Have just written a film for Sir Elton John so pop over to Cannes for a screening. EasyJet rather than private, sadly. Geoff Deane
My film It’s a Boy Girl Thing is being screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Not as part of the festival, I hasten to add. A high-school body-swap movie replete with a king’s ransom of knob gags was never going to be a serious contender for the Palme d’Or. One of the film’s executive producers, Sir Elton John, has also very generously offered to host a party and screening for the film at his chateau in Nice. All in all, I decide an EasyJet return is a solid investment.
I’d been to the festival a few times before and have always liked the South of France. I once had a six-week stint there with my son Woody when my mum was in hospital in Cannes, recovering from an operation. We’d been on a cruise when she fell and broke her hip. You know a holiday’s going well when you see an 80 year-old Jewish lady leaving the ship in a winch.
This time, in Cannes, I share a flat with David Quantick. David is a comedy writer who won an Emmy for his work on the US political sitcom Veep. I only mention that because he has a team of lawyers working around the clock to ensure that you do so every time his name is used anywhere, ever, until the end of time. He even signs his kids’ birthday cards, “from your loving dad, Emmy-Award winning comedy writer, David Quantick”.
The flat is centrally located and decorated nicely. So much so we can even invite people over for drinks. I mean, we don’t, but we could have. There are a couple of snags with the place. The shower cubicle is tiny. And neither Dave nor myself are small people. Also, the exposed pipes and fittings get boiling hot when it’s in use. The upshot of this is every time one of us is in the shower, it’s a countdown until there’s a howl of angry expletives as bare flesh meets scorching metal.
This is hilarious for the other one, less so for the naked, wet, burns victim. Then there are the beds. Both have really crappy mattresses which offer about as much support as Jeremy Corbyn at a Maccabi Tel Aviv FC home game. Dave suffers a bit with his Jim and Jack anyway. And so it was on the second day that he gets up and enters our attractive kitchen-diner, bent over at right angles.
He is in great pain and cannot straighten up. Dave would remain in this position for the rest of the trip. Cannes during the festival is host to the great and the good, the rich and the famous, the beautiful and the even more so. But let me tell you, nothing attracts attention quite like two big middle-aged English geezers walking down La Croisette, one of whom is folded over with his jacksy sticking out.
We go into a pharmacy to get something to help with the pain. Neither of us speak French. Everyone stares as Dave struggles to explain, rather unnecessarily given the circumstances, what the problem is. I help out by repeatedly pointing to his protruding rear-end and asking loudly if they have any arsehole ointment. Dave tells me to f*** off.
The first screening at a cinema in the centre of town seems to go okay. I tell Dave that I hate sitting there watching my own work. He says don’t worry, so does everyone else. But it gets some good laughs and I’m relieved. The next day I get a taxi over to the chateau. It had been built in the 1920s as an artist’s colony and is the most beautiful home I have ever been in.
I’m there early with the film’s producer, Steve Hamilton Shaw, Elton and David Furnish. Steve suffers from nuclear-grade insomnia and tells me about his recent stay at a sleep clinic in Sweden in search of a cure. I tell him he should have tried sitting in on a note-giving session with himself and saved his money.
We take a stroll around the place looking at the art on show. Lichtenstein, Warhol, Schnabel . . . I could go on. Well, I could if I knew more about art. I make a decision not to drink for the day. Now I enjoy a drink, sometimes many, but this can, on occasion, lead to difficulties. Particularly if I’m stressed or overexcited.
At the Kinky Boots premiere a few months previously, I had not been on best behaviour and a prominent Disney exec had told me publicly I would never work in this town again. Yikes. Smitten down by a cliché in the prime of my career. A part of me is now thinking, ”F*** you, I’m at Elton’s gaff just about to have my film shown” but my rarely-seen sensible side decides to err on the side of caution. Elton and David have only ever been nice and supportive, and I don’t want to repay that by acting like a dick. So teetotal it is.
The party is great. I meet Liz Hurley, who is super-friendly and as fit as, well, Liz Hurley. I am introduced to Lulu and tell her she really makes me want to shout. Don’t get a laugh. I also get to see Elton transform from a bloke hanging around the house in a tracky to professional Elton – looking sharp, being charming and funny all night long to the neverending succession of people who wanted to meet and have their pictures taken with him. How do you do that? He was awesome. I successfully swerve the river of pink champagne being diverted our way by a team of waiters who look more like Greek gods than regular serving staff. But there is still a disaster of sorts. Which is not down to me, I might add.
The whole point of the evening is the screening and promotion of the film. Only the film never turned up. It had been couriered over by the distributor in London. It transpires that when such international packages hit their destination country, they are auctioned off to local couriers for the final, to-the-door delivery. Ours had been picked up by a small father-and-son firm who, as luck would have it, didn’t work Sundays. And there was no way to get hold of them.
So, as we all gathered at this lavish bash to watch my film, my film was sitting in a lock-up down the road, owned by Jacques Bonhomme and his first-born, Nobby. You couldn’t make it up.
But I was still buzzing. It had been a night to remember. In fact, I continued to buzz all the way home the following day. Right up until the moment I open my front door to discover a pipe had burst and water was pissing out all over my ground floor. At two in the morning, I am still ankle deep in it, on the dog and bone to an emergency plumber, trying to work out what the f*** a stopcock is. It is of juxtapositions such as this that the fabric of my life is so divinely tailored.
