Before Michelle Yeoh was introduced as the guest of honor at the Kering Women in Motion dinner in Cannes, festival director Thierry Frémaux recalled Yeoh’s first visit to Cannes in 2002, when she was invited to be part of the jury that decided the Palme d’Or.
With Yeoh enjoying a recent awards season, culminating in the Best Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I stopped by her table on Sunday and asked if her trip to Cannes two decades ago gave her a defining perspective for the awards show have given.
Yeoh brightened. “We were just chatting about this!” she said, referring to her neighbors at the table, which included actors Brie Larson and Paul Dano, members of this year’s Cannes jury.
Yeoh said that in 2002, not long after the release of her hit song “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” she had no idea what she was getting into when she accepted Frémaux’s invitation to join the jury. “It’s very intense because you see two or three movies a day and the movies aren’t light-hearted,” she said. “Sometimes they’re three hours long and not always easy to digest.”
Although her jury chairman, David Lynch, proved to be a stabilizing force for the group — “David is always calm and he sets the tone,” she said — the experience of watching films like Gaspar Noé’s harrowing “Irreversible” and the Das Holocaust drama The Pianist (which won the Palme d’Or) was more tense than Yeoh expected: “Some of us felt kind of emotional towards the end, it’s like you’re an artist processing what you’re seeing and what you’re doing goes.” through these rollercoaster rides.”
She exhaled at the memory. “Angry! It was a bit too emotional. Maybe I was too young at the time and didn’t have enough experience,” said Yeoh, now 60, “but since then I don’t think I’ve agreed to another jury.”
Could anything convince her to come back? I came up with a tempting hypothesis: what if Frémaux offered her the position of jury president?
“If Thierry asked me to do anything, I would do it,” Yeoh said. “That’s a very simple answer.”
The Kering dinner proved to be a fun evening for the actress, who later got up on her chair to dance with Larson while a saxophonist played nearby. But Yeoh did tell me that the soiree that has been most important to her lately was a dinner in Hong Kong to celebrate her Oscar win, which was attended by some of the Asian movie greats she started with, like Chow Yun-fat and Donnie Yen.
“The most important thing is that you have to acknowledge where you come from,” she said. “Being from Malaysia is one thing, but my career really started in Hong Kong, where I learned the craft and started my journey. So it was important to come back and tell them how much they have meant to me over the years.”
They all remained friends, she added, “Do you know that sometimes when you’re real friends, you don’t have to call each other every day or see each other all the time?” She smiled. “You just pick up where you left off.”