Life After Cannes

David Greenspan never knew he would come this far this fast.

As a graduate student at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, the 28-year-old Greenspan made a 12-minute, Japanese-language, black-and-white film called “Bean Cake,” which tells the simple story of a rural Japanese boy’s first day in a new school in 1933 Tokyo. Then an unexpected thing happened. Greenspan thought, “What the heck?” and entered his work in this year’s Cannes Film Festival only to walk off with the top prize--the Palme d’Or--in the short film competition.

It was a memorable experience for both Greenspan and his family, who hail from New York’s Long Island. As his name was announced from the podium and 1,000 people erupted in applause, his mother, Marion, was somewhere up in the top balcony cheering her head off while his father, Joel, and 25-year-old sister, Dena, were outside the hall watching on television monitor because David had only been given one ticket to bring a guest inside.

That was in May. Today, Greenspan can be forgiven if he feels a bit apprehensive about his film future. Although his victory at Cannes got him in the door at talent agencies all over Hollywood, the agents wanted to know one thing: What do you have next? The answer: Nothing. It had all happened so fast that Greenspan did not have another screenplay to show them.

Today, Greenspan is back in Japan (he studied there as an undergraduate) with two friends, trying to churn out a couple of screenplays so that when he returns to Hollywood in October, he will have something to parlay into a directing deal. They found a good spot to help them focus on the task--they’re ensconced in a Buddhist monastery.

Winning a Palme d’Or was great, he said in a recent interview, but it doesn’t mean anything if you can’t build on that success.

“My cousin from Philadelphia said, ‘Wow, if you never accomplish anything else the rest of your life, this is great!”’ Greenspan said. “And I said, ‘No, that’s not the right thing to say!”’

Meanwhile, the USC cinema school is still buzzing about the student who won at Cannes.

“For the next few years around here, we will be beating kids over the head with ‘Bean Cake,”’ said Rick Jewell, the associate dean. “It’s amazing that a student could win the short film award at perhaps the most prestigious international film festival.”

Despite illustrious alumni including George Lucas and Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis, officials at USC’s respected film school can’t recall another USC student ever winning at Cannes with a student-made film.

Greenspan had also entered the film at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was rejected, but it did get accepted at the smaller, quirkier Slamdance festival this year in Park City, Utah.

As for Cannes, Greenspan said he was talking to his film school friends who said they had sent off their work to the student section.

“I asked them why, and they just assumed they couldn’t get into the main competition,” he recalled. “It was only the postage, so I said, ‘What the hell.”’ Ironically, his entry was rejected by the student section.

‘The Lunch Date’ Sets Student Standard

Greenspan is not the first student filmmaker to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes--but it is rare. Annette Insdorf, director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University in New York, notes that in 1990, then-Columbia student Adam Davidson won the Palme d’Or for his short called “The Lunch Date.” The film went on to win the Oscar for best live-action short.

Cari Beauchamp, who wrote the 1992 book about Cannes called “Hollywood on the Riviera,” said that whatever pressure is placed on a filmmaker who wins a prestigious award right out of school has to be daunting, but it is also a golden opportunity to “put your head together with a couple of other people and ... figure out [how] to get into doors in a way that will really matter.”

Greenspan, who graduated from USC last year, said his parents helped bankroll the $12,000 needed to produce the movie. (His father is a physician specializing in infectious diseases.) At Cannes, the film was among 12 entries voted on by a panel headed by director Erick Zonka (“The Dreamlife of Angels”). For his victory, Greenspan received no money, but he did get a scroll that his parents framed and proudly display back home in Long Island.

“I said to the guy I sat next to [at the Cannes ceremony], ‘This is the coolest thing that has ever happened,”’ Greenspan recalled. “I was sitting there trying to think of something to say if I went up. So, when they called me, I was walking up and stood there and thought, ‘What am I going to do now?”’

For Greenspan, it is altogether fitting that he should return to Japan to re-light his creative fires, for it was there, while spending his junior year studying abroad as an economics major at Harvard, that he caught the directing bug after joining a Kyoto University filmmaking club.

By the time he graduated from Harvard in 1994, Greenspan had made a 35-minute film and was accepted to the University of Texas film school. He was content there, he said, but a semester later, when he learned USC had accepted his application, he jumped at the chance to move to Los Angeles.

A friend in Kyoto had suggested that if Greenspan was ever looking for material to make a short film, he should check out a book of selected writings by Lafcadio Hearn, a critic and journalist from America who settled in Japan in 1890. Hearn, the son of an Anglo-Irish surgeon major in the British army and a Greek mother, married a daughter of a samurai family and took the name Koizumi Yakumo.

“His favorite thing was to write down Japanese folk tales,” Greenspan said. “Although he is totally obscure in America, a lot of Japanese people have heard of him. He’s famous for writing down ghost stories, supernatural things.”

For “Bean Cake,” Greenspan selected one of Hearn’s darker stories about two children who grow up and fall madly in love, but when they can’t be with each other they commit suicide in front of a train. “Bean Cake,” however, is only based on one small slice of the story and the time is moved forward to 1933, when Japan’s militarist government was menacing Asia and Emperor Hirohito was viewed as a god in his homeland.

The film, which Greenspan co-wrote with Noriko Kimura and Chris Zeller, opens with a fourth-grader named Uchida sitting at a table waiting for his mother to place a plate of freshly baked red bean cakes in front of him. Relishing each delicious bite, he feels there is nothing in the world to compare to these delicious pastries.

When he arrives at school dressed in an old-looking kimono, other children attired in spiffy, clean uniforms laugh and call him a “country bumpkin.” All, that is, except for a pretty girl in pigtails named Mihara who takes a liking to her new classmate. During class, the teacher asks him what is the most important thing in the world to him. He replies: “Bean cakes.”

Greenspan said he almost didn’t make the movie because his USC mentor initially resisted the idea of using Japanese dialogue with English subtitles.

“My mentor picked the project on the condition that I do it in English,” Greenspan said. “I did a whole round of casting in English. Then I went into his office and said, ‘I’m going to quit the project. This is going to be another student film. Nobody is going to believe this. Please, let me do this.’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t feel you felt so strongly about it. No problem.”’

Now, Greenspan says, the pressure is on. “Basically, what you are supposed to do coming out of school is have a good short and have a few feature film scripts, so some agent sees it,” he said. “I don’t have one yet. My friend from Harvard, Seamus Gallagher, moved out here in March. We were going to be writing partners and we wrote a couple of short sitcom scripts not knowing that my short film was going to do well.”

So Greenspan is taking two months off. “A friend of mine invited us. He is a very wealthy monk in Shikoku, the island where the main character in ‘Bean Cake’ is supposed to be from. We are going to stay at the monastery and teach a little bit of English in the morning and try and just get away from everything. Hopefully, I can come back with some scripts.”