Aside from his day job as arguably America’s greatest movie director, Martin Scorsese spends what little down time he has as one of the world’s most high-profile champions of film restoration. Currently, the man behind Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed, is in Cannes promoting his World Cinema Foundation’s latest initiative to remaster, preserve, and exhibit neglected foreign classics that might otherwise crumble to dust. We chatted with Scorsese about the project (and his next one — a recently announced biopic of Frank Sinatra).

EW: Why did you start the World Cinema Foundation?

Scorsese: It came out of the success we had over the past 17 or 18 years with the archivists at the [Hollywood] studios getting over 500 films restored and preserved. So we formed a new group to help countries that are underdeveloped, archive their negatives. In many cases, they don’t even have buildings to put the films in. And we felt we could make these films available worldwide so they could be seen.

EW: How have American audiences’ appetite for foreign films changed? Are they more willing to watch imports now?

Scorsese: In the ’60s and ’70s, the generation I was a part of, we were very influenced by films from abroad. They enriched our culture. Films from Western Europe and Russia and Japan. But there’s also an extraordinary cinema coming out of Africa, out of South America, and this is something that would be of great benefit to all of us around the world.

EW: This year, you’ve restored and preserved 1969’s Al Momia from Egypt, 1991’s A Brighter Summer Day from Taiwan, and 1936’s Redes from Mexico. Is the idea to tackle three or four films each year?

Scorsese: Ideally, as many as possible. It depends on how many films are submitted. And right now, there’s only a few people doing this — the restoration, I mean. That’s a bit of a limitation. And they do take some time to do.

Read more from Scorsese and see links to streaming versions of last year’s WCF titles after the jump.

EW: Even die-hard movie buffs won’t have heard of most of these films. How did you select the ones you did for this year?

Scorsese: Well, for example, I had been reading about this film Touki Bouki,
a film from the ‘70s from Senegal, so I got a copy of that. And that
opened up a door to another kind of cinema for me. And the Egyptian
film, Al Momia, was one I had been searching for for years! And
I still haven’t seen it! I just introduced it here at Cannes and I
wanted to sit down and watch it, but I had to talk to you! (laughs)

EW: Sorry about that.

Scorsese: I’ve been trying to see a good color print of the film
since the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. It’s a beautiful, haunting film about
time and memory and the debt we owe to the past. A very melancholy and
gorgeous looking picture.

EW: One of the aims of your initiative is to make these films
available to Americans by streaming video (on theauteurs.com and
iTunes) and on DVD through the Criterion Collection and Netflix. Don’t
you think it’s a little ironic that these lost pieces of celluloid are
being given a second life digitally and over the internet?

Scorsese: I guess there is a slight irony to it. But you have to
understand that the only thing that we really know lasts is celluloid. That lasts! We have no idea what’s going to happen with digital.

EW: So you’re still sticking to your old-school guns?

Scorsese: Well, digital is apparently very difficult to store. I
don’t even know what it looks like, quite honestly. Film, right now, is
the only thing we know lasts, so it behooves the people who own these
films to make sure that the original elements are protected and
preserved.

EW: Are you seeing any movies while you’re in Cannes?

Scorsese: I saw [1948’s restored classic] The Red Shoes last night.

EW: And? How many times have you seen that now?

Scorsese: That restoration’s taken years. I don’t know how many
times I’ve seen it! That’s like asking ‘How many times have you
listened to Beethoven’s Seventh?’ It’s a part of your life. But I’d
never seen it like this since maybe when I was 8.

EW: It was just announced that you would be directing a biopic of
Frank Sinatra. Any chance we’ll get to see Leonardo DiCaprio as Old
Blue Eyes?

Scorsese: It’s hard to talk about it because we’ve been working on it for a number of years. [Field of Dreams screenwriter]
Phil Alden Robinson’s been working on the script and it was announced
yesterday. And I literally don’t think anyone’s read the script yet
except myself and Phil. We’re still working on it. So there’s no actor
yet. Sorry, I can’t tell you more than that. 

Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki Bouki (Senegal, 1973)

Metin Erksan’s Dry Summer (Turkey, 1964)

Kim Ki-Young’s The Housemaid (South Korea, 1960)

Ahmed El Maanouni’s Transes (Morocco, 1981)

addCredit(“Dziekan/Retna Ltd”)

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Roger Ebert is in Cannes this year. For decades, such a headline would be like announcing that the sun came up this morning, since Roger has been in Cannes for over a quarter of a century, savoring the film festival and sending witty dispatches via every state-of-the-art communication device in his arsenal: He has always been an excited kid when it comes to technological advances, a whiz with a mini digital camera and a laptop when some of his colleagues were still using Morse Code and Teletype machines. (Come to think of it, I suspect a few of those old guys still are. They’re the ones clogging the aisles while fumbling with their newfangled cell phones as the press corps spills out of the Palais after a screening.)

But, of course, Roger has been ill these past few years. He can no longer speak. Travel, even with the phenomenal organizational support of his powerhouse wife, Chaz, has got to be a challenge of proportions unknown to the crew of the Enterprise. So the sight of him here at the festival he loves so much is a thrilling thing. To me, it’s more thrilling than a Brad Pitt sighting. But that’s just me. Plus, the guy writes more in a day than ten of us PopWatch jockeys put together. Formidable.

And now on to a formidable movie, taking the early lead as the 2009 festival favorite: A Prophet, by Jacques Audiard, is a strong French take on Goodfellas, a young man’s coming of age in prison as a mob power. Impressive newcomer Tahar Rahim plays Malik El Djebena, illiterate, alone, and friendless when he enters the prison system. An old-time Corsican crime boss in the joint takes Malik on both as a kind of a slave (the Corsican crew call him an "Arab dog") and a protege. But the quick learner doesn’t stay a slave forever…. Audiard, who turned James Toback’s Fingers into the crackling French pic The Beat That My Heart Skipped, has a great feel for mob-and-prison genre at its most stripped down — there’s none of the eroticized flourishes of TV’s Oz. And he’s got an authoritative ear for the French-Arab-Muslim cultural stew. I suspect the Cannes jury — which includes We Own the Night director James Gray — will love it, too.

As for the trend that ought to end? I’ve seen at least three young European men-about-Cannes holding their flopping hair back with elasticized double headbands.  So from the neck down, they look like Eminem, and from the neck up they look like Gossip Girls. Chic or tragique? I think I’ll check with Roger Ebert.

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There’s very little of the authentic music and even less of the authentic vibe in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, a view of the legendary 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Festival as seen through the eyes of a gay, Jewish, aspiring interior designer and his immigrant parents who ran a ratty Catskill motel down the road from where it all went down. So if you want the truth — and the spirit — get Michael Wadleigh’s great 1970 Woodstock documentary on Netflix. On the other hand, if you want a big, crass dollop of British character actor Imelda Staunton doing a broad oy oy oy Jewish accent, you’re in luck: Staunton hams up an un-Kosher version of a suffocating, manipulative Jewish mother in this unharmonious production (based on a memoir by actual son-of-motel-owners Elliot Tiber, written with Tom Monte). The cast is a combination of plucky young talents (including Martin as Elliot, Emile Hirsch as a shell-shocked Vietnam vet, and Paul Dano and Kelli Garner as tripping hippies) and hipster grown-ups (Liev Schreiber plays a transvestite ex-Marine, and Eugene Levy does his own bit of rocking as dairy farmer Max Yasgur, whose land became sacred concert ground). 

The movie is undergroovy and overplotted: Clean-cut, dutiful Eliot blisses out, and afterwards finds the strength to break away from his damaged, damaging mama. (Come to think of it, aren’t many of the movies Ang Lee has made with screenwriter/producer James Schamus about frustrated outsiders, from Brokeback Mountain to The Hulk?) It may be that Taking Woodstock has just the right tourist vibe to entertain an international Cannes audience that prefers its America (on screen and off) as a notion rather than a reality. Those more familiar with actual American pop culture, on the other hand, who know rising comic personage Demetri Martin from his late-night TV appearances and his recent Comedy Central series Important Things With Demetri Martin, are more likely to think, what were the producers smoking, asking such an untried actor to represent so much history?

Aye, I’m talking about that Paul Schneider, the amiable American guy from Lars and the Real Girl, soon to be seen with John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph in Away We Go. In the sensual Cannes competition film Bright Star, Jane Campion’s lyrical, characteristically feminist historical biopic about the youthful 19th century romance between poet John Keats and girl-next-door Fanny Brawne, Schneider bites into a rich Scottish burr as  Keats’ close and jealous friend, Brown.  Indeed, Schneider is so transformed by beard, belly, wire-rim glasses, and plaid waistcoat that at first I didn’t recognize the effervescent dude-next-door type from The Family Stone and Elizabethtown.

The lovebirds themselves are played by peachy Abbie Cornish (pictured; Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and darkling Ben Whishaw (one of the Bobs Dylan in I’m Not There). And their chemistry is a potent one, as Cornish’s provocative aura of sexual willfulness challenges Whishaw’s expressions of stricken pining. Fanny, as it happened, prided herself on her fashion sense and her sewing skills. The wardrobe, by Campion’s great longtime production and costume designer, Janet Patterson, is, in the words of the Project Runway poet Christian Siriano,  sooo fierce.

Random questions of the kind we all like at the end of one of these posts: Have you taken up sewing as a result of Project Runway? (I have; even bought my first sewing machine.) Also, what movie character’s wardrobe would you most like to wear in real life?