Whoopi’s Two Films Lift Her Cannes Spirits : Festival: With ‘The Player’ and ‘Sarafina!,’ she says, ‘I can hold my head up.’

At the far end of the dock at the Hotel Majestic, past a single topless sunbather who looks as if she’s on assignment from the local Chamber of Commerce, past a cabin cruiser bobbing languidly on the tranquil sea, Whoopi Goldberg is being interviewed. A lot.

“You’re No. 112, or maybe 113,” she says with the affable weariness of an actress who is so in demand at the Cannes Film Festival that, like some ultra-swank condominium, her presence is being carefully parceled out in 15-minute segments. Still, Goldberg says she really does like it here. “You get to go to strange, odd parties. And you see the most amazing bodies, bodies you could never have in your life. Well, maybe once for six minutes you had a body like that.”

Goldberg is especially pleased to be at Cannes this year because she’s associated with a pair of projects (“The Player” and “Sarafina!”) that enable her to feel “I can hold my head up, I don’t have to explain why and how. My choices have not always been popular with the critics. But I notice that nobody gets pissed off at Meryl Streep when she experiments. And I don’t remember the last time one of her movies made $70 million.”

“Sarafina!,” set to open this fall and adapted from the popular stage musical, began for Goldberg at last year’s festival, where she was a juror. “I met Anant Singh (the film’s producer) and we started talking. Who knew they had a film industry in South Africa? He said he was getting ready to do ‘Sarafina!’ and I said I’d love to read the script. I liked it so much that I asked, ‘Is there anywhere I can slip in here without it being too distracting?’ ”

Goldberg ended up playing Mary, the committed teacher in a Soweto school whose students rise up against the repressive forces of South Africa. Seeing the film scenes of rioting inevitably brings to mind the recent unrest in Los Angeles, and Goldberg, who lives part time in the city, says the parallels are apt.

“Soweto turned out to be very much like the U.S. in weird ways,” she says. “In both places there’s a struggle to overcome what people on both sides have been raised to believe is true. It’s like if an alternate New Testament was suddenly found that said Jesus didn’t die on the cross, he lived to a ripe old age with a wife who was a chorus dancer or something. The chains of apartheid have fallen, but the emotional and mental bonds are still in existence.”

Goldberg characterizes the L.A. disturbances as “a huge scream of despair. Our situation has been coming for a very long time. I personally thought it would happen when that young woman was shot in a grocery store. Given the vileness of the racist and homophobic statements politicians have been making for years, we shouldn’t be surprised that this is happening. You can’t step on people that much before they rise up.”

Goldberg herself was involved in a bit of controversy last year when she was a member of the jury that gave the Palm d’Or to “Barton Fink” and passed on Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” a situation the director was not shy in complaining about.

“It didn’t win because it just wasn’t good, it wasn’t a good movie,” Goldberg says with some vehemence. “Spike hurt my feelings when he got on ‘Arsenio’ and put it in the words he did, saying he didn’t get any support from me. I busted my butt to make sure Samuel Jackson (who played Gator in ‘Jungle Fever’) got an acting award, and Spike didn’t talk about all the flak I took, being called nationalistic, for that. But then Spike’s the master at getting attention. But sometimes, when he’s in the attack mode, he doesn’t realize he’s attacking those who are also forging through the tundra.”

Check, Please: “Mark, Mark, where’s the check? You promised it to me in Berlin last year,” producer Ismail Merchant booms with pleasant gusto across the manicured lawn of the chateau that is serving as the headquarters for the “Howards End” contingent at Cannes. “Give me the check.”

Appropriately standing in the shadow of an enormous shade tree planted by Queen Victoria in 1891, Merchant next demands a pen from an onlooker, explaining, “He is from the French Ministry of Culture, he promised me money to do ‘Jefferson in Paris,’ ” (a future Merchant project).

Turning back to the somewhat stunned Mark, he insists on at least being told how much he is going to get from the ministry. “After the meal,” Mark manages to reply weakly.

“That is the French for you,” Merchant jovially responds. “After the meal, mind you, not before.”

The meal today is an elegant buffet lunch for 100-plus members of the press, many of whom seem to be occupied taking photos of Emma Thompson playfully dangling her feet in the chateau pool. Meanwhile, Merchant is more than happy to discuss what looks to be his and director James Ivory’s most successful collaboration in three decades of working together.

“We just opened ‘Howards End’ in London, where we broke our own record with ‘A Room With a View’ by 30,000 pounds,” he says. “It’s really phenomenal. When one has set out in life to do a certain kind of picture, if success comes as well it’s doubly rewarding.”

In the States, “Howards End,” despite rapturous reviews, has followed a very slow and deliberate release pattern. “We felt the best way to develop a word of mouth is to let the audience support it strongly in one or two cinemas. Then, when people can’t get in, ‘Howards End’ goes on the top of the list.”

Next for the Merchant-Ivory team is an adaptation of a more contemporary novel, the Booker Prize-winning “Remains of the Day.” But perhaps thinking of the Marks of his world, Merchant doesn’t foresee his kind of fund-raising and filmmaking getting any easier. “People don’t knock at the door,” he says, the voice of wry experience. “You have to knock at their doors.”