Rising British star George Mackay and Dominic West were set to turn out at the Cannes Film Festival today to present a heartwarming true story of how lesbians and gay men backed the 1984 miners’ strike.
The culture clash comedy drama Pride, which also stars Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Andrew Scott, is the Cannes debut of both director Matthew Warchus, the recently announced next boss of the Old Vic, and Stephen Beresford, an actor who made his theatre writing debut with The Last Of The Haussmans at the National.
It is being unveiled in the Directors Fortnight strand of the French festival, with high hopes that it will prove a hit at the box-office as well as with the critics when released in the UK in September.
Warchus, 47, said: “It is a high-spirited, uplifting, funny film.” He added that he and Beresford were thrilled it was being “taken seriously as a piece of writing, performance and film-making in Cannes”.
Andrew Scott, 37, plays one of the gay activists who travel to a Welsh mining community to present money they have raised to support it — to the initial embarrassment of the strikers.
Like Nighy and Staunton, theatre commitments in London mean he cannot attend today but he said it was a funny, moving and important film that was “quite gritty and not saccharine”. He added: “It’s an extraordinary story I think people don’t know about. In this selfie generation, we all talk about individuality, but this is a film about solidarity and how we think we’re all different from each other but really we are the same.”
He added: “Pride doesn’t even cover what all the cast feel about this film. We can say with absolute confidence it is a film anybody could enjoy.”
Warchus, who directed the 1999 film Simpatico with Sharon Stone, said: “The exciting thing is, like the events and characters in the film, it just crashes straight through prejudice.”
