The Greatest Showman #1335 – Premiere Day

"Drunken Country Ballad" Premiere

Ryan Gosling attended. Leonardo DiCaprio was there. Matt Damon showed up. James Franco made an appearance.

Marion Cotillard was present. Marine Vacth attended. Berenice Bejo was in attendance.

Emma Watson showed up. Kristen Stewart arrived. Chris Evans joined the crowd.

Thierry Fumau attended. François Ozon was present. Asghar Farhadi made an appearance. Jim Jarmusch was there too.

And of course, the jury, led by Steven Spielberg and Nicole Kidman, was also in attendance.

Everyone knows the Coen brothers have a deep connection with the Cannes Film Festival. In 1991, they attended for the first time with Barton Fink, winning both the Palme d'Or and the Best Director Award. They later won two more Best Director Awards. This marks their eighth entry in the Cannes main competition.

Thus, it was no surprise that the premiere was expected to be lively, with prominent figures from all walks of life filling the venue. But when the red carpet finally began, the energy was beyond anything anyone had anticipated. The frenzy from the crowd, the reporters, and the guests created a level of excitement that surpassed any previous moments since the film festival's inception.

Emily Chen felt like she might lose her mind.

As a blogger with more than 50,000 followers on Twitter and Instagram, Emily had slowly carved out a name for herself in movie criticism. Her unique perspective as a Chinese resident in New York had gained significant recognition.

This was Emily's third time being invited to the Cannes Film Festival.

While the term "invited" may sound prestigious, it doesn't exactly capture the full reality—there were thousands of bloggers, broadcasters, and film critics receiving similar invitations. Yet, even among them, Emily acknowledged this as a great honor.

Her first two visits to Cannes had been a chaotic rush, with Emily frantically scrambling from one movie to the next, barely able to keep up. Fatigue quickly set in, especially with the twelve-day marathon. But this time, after learning from her past mistakes, she was more prepared and organized.

Cannes is primarily a media event, with more than 4,000 journalists attending. However, the logistics are far from simple. Lumière Hall, where the main competition films screen, only holds 2,000 people. Some seats are reserved for special guests, leaving as few as 1,000 for media members—often fewer. This means long waits and the risk of missing out on the screenings altogether.

If journalists miss a premiere at Lumière Hall, they must queue for a re-screening in a smaller venue, often with limited seats, sometimes as few as 100. Thus, timing is everything.

To manage the large number of reporters, Cannes introduced a press card system, with different color-coded levels that determine access priority. White cards, which are rare and awarded to only a handful of media outlets, provide the highest priority and unrestricted access. Cards in other colors, like pink, yellow, and blue, come with varying degrees of priority, but all require some degree of queuing.

Emily's press card this year was pink, a step up from last year's yellow. This upgrade gave her more flexibility, allowing her to choose the films she was most interested in and schedule some much-needed rest in between.

So far, Emily had been thriving at the festival. She'd seen up to seven films on her busiest days and managed to write and send her reviews between screenings. Time for eating, however, was scarce.

Today marked the premiere of Drunken Country Ballads, which had garnered massive attention, not just because of its potential for awards, but because of its star-studded cast, including Renly Hall and Justin Timberlake. The combination of the Coen brothers' direction and the high-profile cast made it the hottest film at the festival.

Emily, eager to attend the premiere, arrived early. Though her pink press card guaranteed her a decent spot, she could already see the frenzy of reporters lining up. The queue for pink press cards stretched on for hundreds of journalists, and the surrounding crowd was no less overwhelming—at least a thousand people packed the area around the red carpet. The sea of bodies was so vast that it felt almost suffocating.

She had expected the chaos but was still unprepared for the sheer intensity of it all. Emily had thought that the red carpet for The Great Gatsby had been the pinnacle of Cannes' excitement. But now, she realized that was nothing more than an appetizer—this was the real feast.

Emily, not a photojournalist, knew her job was to watch the film and report on it, not to linger around the red carpet. Yet, the immense line made her question whether she would even be able to get into the screening at all.

When the red carpet event officially began, Emily realized that the queue had grown exponentially, disappearing around the corner of the film palace. She even doubted whether the entire pink press card queue had already been fully mobilized.

Turning around, she noticed other late-arriving reporters in shock. Then, she spotted an older man with a white press card who had just arrived. He stopped, surveyed the long line, and exclaimed in French, "God, is this Toronto?"