CANNES REPORT : Press, Hype and Stereotypes : Movies: ‘sex, lies’ director Steven Soderbergh--a previous festival sensation--knows his latest film is a tougher sell. For first-timer Allison Anders, though, ‘It’s really a trip.’

It’s the first time for Allison Anders at the Cannes Film Festival, and so far nothing has diluted her pleasure. “I always dreamed I would be here, and when that really comes true you’re astounded, you think, ‘Oh my God, it really happened,’ ” says the pleased director, whose empathetic “Mi Vida Loca” is being shown out of competition in the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight. “It’s really a trip.”

Steven Soderbergh, on the other hand, has been here before. In a big way. His “sex, lies, and videotape” was a sensation and won the prestigious Palm d’Or four years ago when the director was only 26. Now he is back in the official competition with “King of the Hill,” a gentle, sympathetic rendering of A.E. Hotchner’s memoir about growing up in the Depression that Soderbergh knows “is not the kind of film I think is going to galvanize any festival.” So things have been somewhat different.

The first time over, Soderbergh remembers, “It was like being a Beatle for a week. It was so unexpected, like someone saying, ‘You’ve just won $10 million,’ and sticking a microphone in your face. I didn’t know how to react, I don’t know what I said.”

This time around, the director got bumped from an interview area by the hotter “Farewell to My Concubine,” received local reviews that made him think “apparently it’s a good thing I don’t read French,” and has had to endure questions about whether the fact that his film will be distributed by a major studio means he has abandoned the independent film scene.

“Here’s the most amazing irony of all,” Soderbergh (who has always seen himself as going back and forth between independent and studio films) says with some heat. “At a budget of $8 million, this would have been a huge risk for an independent, and I guarantee whoever financed it would have been all over me to make it more palatable. For Gramercy and Universal, $8 million is not a big risk, and I got left totally alone.”

Just as amazing as Soderbergh’s winning the Palm d’Or is that Anders, a warm, exuberant, self-described “ex-hippie chick” got into writing and directing in the first place. A native of Ashland, Ky. (as is Ashley Judd, by coincidence here with “Ruby in Paradise”), Anders remembers “a gnarly childhood, with a divorced mom, violence, men coming and going. I’ve been a high school dropout, a runaway, in jail, all kinds of crazy stuff.”

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Then Anders discovered the written word, and “after I had my kids I saw myself as someone who wrote poetry and was a waitress.” But she returned to school as a way to get more financial aid, studied film and journalism at L.A. Valley College, transferred to UCLA, and so flooded director Wim Wenders with letters that he let her be a production assistant on “Paris, Texas.” Her festival hit “Gas Food Lodging” followed, and then came the idea for “Mi Vida Loca.”

“I lived in Echo Park from 1986 to 1992, and I would see these girl gangs walking in the neighborhood,” Anders, now a Silver Lake resident, explains. “I’ve been around people on the fringe, this was not an unfamiliar subculture, but there was something different about these girls. When they’d see you coming, blocks away, they’d stop talking and walked stone-faced toward you, across the whole block so you’d have to go in the street. They were incredibly beautiful and exotic, so intense and so intimidating with their makeup, hair and meticulous way of dressing that I was like, ‘Damn, what is up with these girls?’ It stirred me up to find out.”

Anders tried to set up meetings with the girls, “but I got months of ‘Yeah, we’ll meet you at the gas station at 5 p.m.’ and then they wouldn’t show.”

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When meetings were finally set up with the help of a local drug dealer, Anders was surprised to realize that the gang members “were certainly aware of every stereotype about them that had been put on film. One of the girls complained, ‘In these movies, girls don’t get to do nothing, they just get to stand under the guy’s arm,’ which I thought was a true feminist analysis.”

Anders solicited serious input from the participants themselves. “The kids went through every draft, and it was something to see gangbangers with pencils behind their ears, scripts under their arms, saying things like, ‘What does V.O. (voice-over) mean?’ ” Anders remembers, laughing. “One guy said, ‘This film needs more action,’ and I thought, ‘What is this? A studio executive?’ ”

The film was shot in Echo Park, but not before gang members drove around with the location manager “saying, ‘We can’t shoot on this street but we can go down there.’ We were very careful not to take these kids out of their neighborhood and we always worried, especially when we shot at night, that something could go down.”

“Mi Vida Loca” in fact closes with a memorial to one of the gang girls who died of a drug overdose just after the picture finished. “That was especially hard for the others to take because revenge was impossible, there was nobody they could go get.”

Despite the gratifying attention her films have gotten, with “Mi Vida Loca” being the first project to be made specifically for theatrical release by HBO Showcase, Anders still lives her life for herself. “As driven as I am,” she says, “I spend most of my waking hours thinking about my private life, my mom, my sisters, my children, my relationships with men. I’m not terribly ambitious.”

Similarly, Steven Soderbergh, a direct and articulate individual who lives near Charlottesville, Va., doesn’t let other people’s thoughts or expectations about his work influence the way he lives his life.

“As far as I’m concerned, my career has gone very easily, and the whole weird thing is that people look at me like I’ve got some terminal illness. But since ‘sex, lies’ I’ve gotten to make two movies I wanted to make very much, so I feel really lucky. If I relied on other people’s approbation, I would be paralyzed.

“And it’s not like I walk around and every hour people are asking me, ‘Do you think you’ll ever top that film?’ That only happens when I go to places like this. Winning the Palm d’Or has only helped me. I can’t do anything for the people who’ve been disappointed in what has happened since.”