‘Blue Ruin’ and ‘The Opportunist’ were admitted to the festival, bringing their respective teams of young American filmmakers to the Riviera (on the cheap-ish).
A few months ago, Jeremy Saulnier had risen early for a flight to Cleveland when he saw a message in his inbox. It was in French.
The 36-year-old New Yorker was traveling to the Buckeye State to shoot corporate videos, which the director had been doing to pay the bills since his filmmaking career fizzled six years before with the disappointing performance of his first movie, a genre comedy called “Murder Party.”
The email that morning was from programmers at the Cannes Film Festival. They really liked a rough cut of his new effort, an unconventional revenge drama titled “Blue Ruin,” which he and his wife had liquidated their retirement accounts to make. The programmers seemed interested in showing it in the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section.