Cannes Film Festival: Cantona compares director to Sir Alex

Published on Monday 18 May 2009 14:46

ERIC Cantona said today that working with Ken Loach on his latest film was like being coached by Sir Alex Ferguson.

The former Manchester United player stars as himself in Loach's Looking For Eric, which is competing for the coveted Palme d'Or for best movie at the Cannes Film Festival.

He said the director, who won the Palme in 2006 with The Wind That Shakes The Barley, shared Ferguson's ability to drive people to excel themselves.

"They are very similar," Cantona said, "these are two activities that are totally different, but the way they go about getting 100% out of the actors or the players is very similar.

"The great difficulty is to maintain your quality from match to match, from film to film."

Over many years, both Ferguson and Loach had found ways of getting the best out of their players and actors by setting them new challenges and new ambitions, he said.

"Ferguson and Ken Loach are where they are because they have an enormous amount of humility," he said.

"One is a great manager, one a great director, and they are both great men."

Cantona did not say if the 72-year-old director ever gave anyone the fiery Scot's famous "hairdryer treatment" during filming.

The film tells the story of Eric Bishop, a postman and Manchester United fanatic played by Steve Evets, whose life is falling apart when his idol Cantona starts appearing to him, giving advice in his own inimitable pseudo-philosophical style.

Evets, 49, who described himself as a "jobbing actor", said he thought Cantona's involvement in the film would be limited to co-producing.

In keeping with his usual approach to film-making, Loach gave his actors their scenes only a short time before they were to film them, and until Cantona appeared on set in his first scene, Evets had no idea he would be acting in the film.

"They'd got him in there like a military operation behind this curtain," Evets said.

"There he was, bang, in my room. It was dead surreal. It was like an acid trip condensed into one minute. I was in a scene with Eric Cantona. In the film."

Loach said that after making a number of very serious films, he wanted to make something more light-hearted for a change.

"But you can say that a comedy is a tragedy with a happy ending, and the story in this film could be a tragedy, but equally it could be a comedy," he said.

"We felt what we had to do was play the story with truth, and sometimes that's funny and sometimes that's sad, but if you play it with truth, that's okay."

In the course of the film, Cantona tells Eric the postman that during his nine-month suspension from football for the infamous kung-fu kick on a Crystal Palace fan, he learned to play the trumpet, and performs a creaky rendition of the Marseillaise for him.

Cantona, 42, said it was true he had taken up the instrument as he was a fan of jazz trumpeters Miles Davis and Chet Baker.

"When I was suspended I had to train much more than other players, but I couldn't play in the matches, so I decided I should do something productive, so I took up the trumpet," he said.