Director Loach ‘like Ferguson’, says Cantona

ERIC CANTONA said yesterday that working with Ken Loach on his latest film was like being coached by Man Utd boss 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 prize in 2006 for 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, 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.

“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... There he was, bang, in my room. It was dead surreal. . I was in a scene with Eric Cantona – in the film,” Evets said.

Loach said 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.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s master of scandal Lars Von Trier stunned Cannes yesterday with his new film Antichrist, a thriller on love and madness littered with graphic close-ups of sex and mutilation.

Willem Dafoe and France’s Charlotte Gainsbourg provide powerful performances in this visually exquisite film about a couple who retreat to an isolated log cabin to try to overcome grief at the death of their baby son.

It opens with a slow-motion close-up of sexual penetration and veers into a dramatic escalation of violence.

“This is a very dark dream about guilt and sex and stuff,” the 53-year-old director told a packed and rather hostile news conference after the premiere of the sometimes difficult-to-watch film, one of 20 competing for the top Palme d’Or award.