Recalling the primary time one among his movies screened on the Cannes Movie Competition, a younger filmmaker remembered how the length of the standing ovation the viewers gave appeared to develop with each retelling within the media. Within the room, he clocked about “a six-and-a-half-minute standing ovation, [but] by the point I had acquired again to L.A., it had grown to twenty minutes,” he stated. “I stated: ‘Wait a minute, I’m proud of six. I by no means even had a two-minute ovation.’ ”
That director was Steven Spielberg. The movie was E.T. the Additional Terrestrial, which closed the thirty fifth Cannes pageant in 1982. Even again then, they had been timing standing ovations — and arguing about simply how lengthy a pageant viewers stayed on its ft clapping. There’s a protracted a practice of utilizing that determine, ideally inflated, as a advertising hook in your film’s rollout.
“The movie that obtained a 15-minute standing ovation on the Cannes Movie Competition!” shouted one billboard advert for Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (1959).
World premiere standing ovations — who will get a perfunctory three to 4 minutes, who breaks into double digits — has grow to be an nearly manic obsession amongst festivalgoers, or, extra precisely, the movie trades, reporters, and on-line bloggers that cowl them. If reporting ovation durations was restricted to only a handful of extraordinarily lengthy tributes — the 22-minute standing ovation Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth obtained on the 2006 Cannes pageant, or the 20 minutes the group cheered Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 premiere in 2004 — now each high-profile premiere will get its standing ovation stopwatch.
The process is extensively mocked — even by former editor-in-chiefs who performed an outsize position in selling the follow again within the day — however the standing O clock isn’t going wherever. “I hate it, as a result of it reduces a film to a single knowledge level, however it’s very sticky knowledge level,” says an government at a significant U.S. indie distributor. “Folks keep in mind, ‘That movie acquired a 10-minute standing ovation in Cannes.’ ”
Measuring a standing ovation shouldn’t be a precise science. When does it start? When the credit roll or when the home lights come up? When does it finish? THR timing tips are to start out the clock the second folks soar to their ft, normally after the home lights come up, and cease when most individuals start to sit down down, or when the movie’s director is given the mic, because the crowd stops clapping to hear. Different requirements can be found. Nobody is syncing their watches, so anticipate discrepancies. (With Megalopolis, THR began the clock through the closing credit, as a result of the attendees had been already on their ft, cheering. Others waited for the lights.)
A savvy director, or star, can distort the ultimate quantity by hyping up the group, getting them to remain on their ft longer. Nick Cage, as an illustration, led the viewers in a chant of “Surfer! Undergo! Surfer!” at Friday’s Midnight Screening of The Surfer, holding them cheering.
And whereas there are critics and cinephiles in these audiences, the massive crimson carpet premieres are additionally filled with European socialites and celebrity-spotters, dodgy financiers and staff of the businesses that made the film you’re watching. Many of those of us usually are not applauding a movie’s inventive deserves, they’re celebrating the artists within the room, and even the occasion itself. Movies with massive, starry casts get longer standing ovations. So do these with legendary administrators. The prolonged standing O for Megalopolis says much less about what the Cannes viewers actually considered the movie and extra about their need to pay tribute to Francis Ford Coppola and his cinematic legacy.
“When folks stand for ovations on the finish, they’re partly standing for a way they had been made to really feel by the movie, however they’re additionally standing for his or her pleasure for the folks concerned,” David Kajganich, author and producer of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, advised THR after that movie’s Venice pageant debut in 2022. “To me, it’s extra concerning the folks than concerning the movie.”