The 69th Cannes Film Festival opened Wednesday with stormy skies, heightened security, the premiere of a new Woody Allen film and resurrected sex-abuse allegations against the 80-year-old director regarding his adoptive daughter, Dylan.
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The audience reportedly gasped as it was taken as a knock on Allen and possibly on director Roman Polanski, according to Variety.
“I feel that any comedian should be free to tell any joke he wants”.
Penning an article for The Hollywood Reporter, Ronan Farrow compared the “culture of acquiescence. impunity and silence” in the press surrounding the claims directed at Allen to the perceived lack of reporting on the allegations of rape levelled at Bill Cosby. In it, Farrow supported sister Dylan Farrow’s allegations and criticized the media for not, he felt, pursuing the matter thoroughly enough. Farrow wrote, “We are witnessing a sea change in how we talk about sexual assault and abuse”. “I have moved so far past it”, he says of his war of words with the Farrows. “I think that was a hard thing [to] swallow in 30 seconds”.
“I just don’t have any material on it, anything really to draw on”, Allen said.
Allen reiterated his opinions to The Washington Post at the same luncheon: “I never speak to that”. I think it’s all silly, the whole thing. So no, it doesn’t bother me. “I think we kind of nailed it”.
The accusations from Dylan Farrow first surfaced publicly in 1993, when Allen and Mia Farrow were going through a custody battle over their three children, including Dylan’s brothers, Ronan and Moses. Every day, colleagues at news organizations forwarded me the emails blasted out by Allen’s powerful publicist, who had years earlier orchestrated a robust publicity campaign to validate my father’s sexual relationship with another one of my siblings…
Woody Allen was not a fan of a piece published by The Hollywood Reporter and banned their journalists from an event. To me, that is the mistake of the show. He could have said “This Lauren Lafitte person seems very talented and I would love to have him in my next film”.
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Asked if he would ever consider making a movie about a 50-something woman who gets together with a 20-something man, Allen called it “a perfectly valid comic idea”. He said he begins pre-production on Friday on his next movie, a comedy set in an amusement park and potentially filming on Coney Island this summer, “if I can work out the logistics of it”.
