Jordan Firstman hit the ground running at his first Cannes Film Festival, attending the opening night gala and after-party that went into the early-morning hours. The next day, as we devour a late lunch—he has a steak; I have a burrata salad; we both have fries and (of course) rosé—he energetically describes bouncing around the late-night soiree, where he chatted with the likes of Ira Sachs and James Franco. “It does truly feel unlike anything else—it’s like true glamour,” he says of walking the most iconic red carpet in the world. “You’re seeing these ladies in the biggest hats I’ve ever seen, somehow pulling this off. If a bitch in LA was wearing that, I’d be like, No, no!”
Firstman, who rose to fame for his pandemic-era impression videos (in one, he pretended to be banana bread’s publicist), is at the festival with his directorial debut, Club Kid, which will have its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section on May 15. He wrote, directed, and stars in the dramedy, which follows a washed-up New York club promoter whose hard-partying way of life is upended when he discovers he has a son.
Debuting this movie at Cannes was always a dream for Firstman, a cinephile who can rattle off film references with the best of them. “I love cinema, but then I have this newer sensibility and I know what’s going on in the world and on the streets,” Firstman tells Vanity Fair in his first major interview about the movie. “I just feel that if it had played at another festival, I understood how it would go down there so clearly. Cannes felt like such a wild card for it, in an almost dangerous way.”
Cannes is riskier than other festivals—audiences aren’t shy if they don’t like a film, and there’s been booing before. A film that’s for sale, like Firstman’s, might struggle to find a buyer after a terrible premiere. But if the film plays well, Cannes can also launch a career, as it did for Jane Campion, Alejandro Iñárritu, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Jacques Audiard, who all premiered early works at the festival.
The stakes are especially high for Firstman because of the personal nature of the film. He wrote the script during a time of great heartbreak, after ending his relationship with a man he describes as the love of his life. “To be frank, even talking now, I’m holding back tears a little bit,” Firstman says. “It’s hard for me to talk about—there is just so much emotion tied to this for me.”
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