A Taste of the Big Time at Cannes

William Lorton is standing in front of the Paleis des Festival, a pile of printed material in his hands. “They gave this to me,” he says with a kind of ironic disbelief, “because I’m a director.”

Inside the gargantuan Paleis a few days later, Eric Mendelsohn is walking excitedly down the halls. He has just shared a stage with French actor and Cannes Jury President Gerard Depardieu and made some brief remarks to a packed theater in hesitant French. “Oh boy,” he says, “you go speak French to people who know more than a few words. I want to ask Gerard Depardieu for something but I don’t know what. I want to pull out all the stops while I’m still a director.”

Lorton and Mendelsohn, two young filmmakers who don’t know each other and in fact live on opposite ends of the country, are sharing an experience this week. Against daunting odds, and to their enormous astonishment, the films they directed were invited to participate in the Cannes Film Festival and, in a country that adores directors, they have both found themselves plucked out of the ether and made the center of considerable attention. “I’m taking it in in little bits,” Mendelsohn says, trying to stay calm. “I can’t even begin to digest all this.”

At age 22, Lorton may be the youngest director in the festival, and in fact missed his graduation at USC to attend. His junior-year student film “Cheating, Inc.,” is the only American effort of the dozen accepted for the short film competition, and it is also the first film from the USC School of Cinema-Television ever to compete at Cannes.

Mendelsohn is a 27-year-old New Yorker whose own student works have played at festivals from Melbourne to Chicago. His 26-minute film, “Through an Open Window,” was accepted to open the prestigious Un Certain Regard section of Cannes, one of only two non-features in the program, putting him in the heady company of directors such as Oscar-winning Jonathan Demme and Edward Olmos. With one difference.

“I’ll bet Paul Verhoeven wasn’t sitting up collating and stapling 2,000 press kits and underlining his name in yellow,” Mendelsohn says. “I did that right up to getting on the plane, and I labeled photos during the flight.”

Though some churlish types have suggested to Mendelsohn that he made “Window” as “a calling card, a festival piece,” that is not the case. Originally an oil painter, he knows that “If you want to be a great painter you just don’t paint one and hang it up. Because film is so expensive you forget that you have to practice. No, I’m not wise beyond my years, I’m nervous beyond my years.”

The delicately observed story of a woman whose careful life falls apart when a bird flies in her house, “Window” stars Anne Meara. Mendelsohn, who works as an assistant to costume designer Jeff Kurland, got the script to Meara’s husband, Jerry Stiller, when they both worked on a TV show called “Tattinger’s.”

“I said, ‘I’m sooo sorry to be doing this, I know it’s not how it’s done in the real world, but I think Anne would be great for the part.’ When I didn’t hear for awhile, I thought it was the end. Then, three or four months later, she called out of the blue and said, ‘So when are we making this?,’ like when is the first day of shooting? The truth was we (he and producer Rocco Caruso) hadn’t planned on making this at all until she called.”

Mendelsohn used his parents’ house in Old Bethpage, N.Y., as his set even though he knew, “When you shoot anywhere you’ve ruined the place. But I concealed that from my parents. They’re very happy now, but they weren’t so happy then.”

“Window” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and Mendelsohn and Caruso sent it to Cannes as a lark. “We never in a million years believed we’d be accepted,” he says. “Then they told us it was in Un Certain Regard , which sounded like a letdown. But when friends told me it must be a mistake, that that section was only for feature films. We were so nervous Rocco called Gilles Jacob, the festival director, and when he confirmed we were in, we knew it wasn’t the booby prize.”

Jacob also heard from William Lorton, and for a similar reason. Lorton relates: “When I got the phone call in the thick French accent, I thought which of my friends was it who was trying to fool me. I was so sure it was a joke, I didn’t tell anyone at first. The festival said I would get information by Friday, and when I didn’t get anything by Monday night, I went to the Kinko’s on Figueroa near campus and faxed the festival. Gilles Jacob faxed me back and said, ‘No, it is not a joke. Your film is in the festival. P.S. I hope your nerves are calmed down after this fax.’ ”

Film-struck since he was 7, when he saw “Star Wars” and made his own 8mm rip-off, Lorton began making mini films for his local PBS station when he was 12. Accepted at USC, he was turned down three consecutive semesters for the ultra-competitive film school, only getting in on his fourth and final try.

Lorton made “Cheating, Inc.,” a very amusing tale of a test and its unexpected aftermath, for a class that allowed him only 1,300 feet of film and insisted on an 8-minute, no-dialogue result.

Lorton didn’t think of doing anything with the finished product until a summer job selling popcorn at the Mann Village Theater, where “I saw ‘Robin Hood’ 216 times and watched it all the way through maybe 50” made him focus more on his future. He found the list of film festivals that accepted student films and/or shorts and sent his to Cannes, “because every other festival had either a fee or reams of forms. This didn’t have a form or a fee.

“They said, ‘Just send a tape with your name on it to this address.’ ” He did, and forgot about it until that early morning phone call.

Aside from all of the above, Lorton and Mendelsohn have one other thing in common about their Cannes experience, and that is that it’s the first time overseas for both. Lorton speaks not a word of French, and wryly says: “I didn’t plan to be coming here, if I’d known I would have studied the damn thing. I tried to buy a phrase book, but the book stores were closed because of the riots.”

As for Mendelsohn, whose French was good enough for those opening remarks, he still can’t believe he’s here. “The only thing I knew about the Riviera,” he says, looking out at the palm trees, “is Bain de Soleil . “