Oscar rivals Steven Spielberg and Ang Lee share the love at Cannes

Correspondent J. Sperling Reich reports on the mutual admiration society of two recent Oscar rivals on the Cannes 2013 jury.

One could easily mistake directors Ang Lee and Steven Spielberg as competitors rather than colleagues. After all, just a few short months ago Lee and Spielberg were both vying for one of the most coveted awards a filmmaker can receive: an Academy Award for Best Director. Though many Oscar prognosticators had picked Spielberg to win the award for his film Lincoln, it was Lee who walked off with the trophy for Life of Pi. For the next two weeks, however, the two auteurs will be collaborating with seven other noteworthy members of the movie industry as judges at the 66th annual Cannes Film Festival.

Spielberg is no stranger to Cannes. His first feature film, The Sugarland Express, appeared in competition at the festival and won him the award for best screenplay. He returned in 1982 with E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, in 1986 with The Color Purple, and again in 2008 with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, all of which appeared out of competition. Now Spielberg has been charged with presiding over the Cannes jury as president, an honor he has not been able to accept previously because, as he explained to members of the press, he is usually busy shooting a film each May.

Lee is no Cannes slouch either. His 1994 film Eat Drink Man Woman appeared at the festival, as did The Ice Storm three years later. In 2000, Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the talk of the festival. His last film to appear in competition was Taking Woodstock in 2009.

The announcement that Lee would be joining Spielberg on this year's Cannes jury raised a few eyebrows. Can two big-league filmmakers such as Spielberg and Lee work on the same jury with opinionated filmmakers such as Romania's Cristian Mungiu as well as Oscar winners Nicole Kidman and Christoph Waltz? On the first day of the festival, Spielberg assured the public the idea of any rivalry between Lee and himself was completely false.

"Ang and I have known each other for a long time and we have never been competitors, we have always been colleagues," Spielberg declared. "That will just continue. I worship Life of Pi, therefore I worship Ang Lee as well. I admire all of Ang's movies."

Sitting quietly a few feet away, Lee confirmed, "Steven and I, we're good friends. I worship him. I don't think any result will change how I feel about him."

Both filmmakers seemed to want to put the recent Academy Awards issue behind them and get on with the business at hand in Cannes. "Cannes is a prestigious film festival. It's full of opinions. It's artistically driven. More highbrow," Lee explained. "Oscar is kind of a competition of a particular group of 6,000 Academy members. It has the element of popularity. It's sort of work and business and popularity and societal. You don't know how the wind blows that year politically."

Spielberg picked up on Lee's reference to politics in discussing the difference between the Oscars and the awards presented at the end of each Cannes Film Festival. "The nice thing about this is there is no campaigning," said Spielberg. "It's such a relief that we're going to be seeing movies and we're going to be caucusing and we're going to be deliberating final results and we don't have to go through the campaigning, which as you know follows awards season in America like a political cycle. We had campaigning for the 2012 election and there's always campaigning for the Oscar election and there' no campaigning here and that is a breath of fresh air for me."

Spielberg was well-prepared to answer questions about whether he could get the eight other jurors to come to agreement when deciding which of this year's films should receive the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or. "I'm going to have to look at the Sidney Lumet film 12 Angry Men again as a tutorial for the final day of deliberation," he said jokingly.

Besides those already mentioned, rounding out this year's Cannes Film Festival jury are director Lynne Ramsay, writer Naomi Kawase, and actors Daniel Auteuil and Vidya Balan.

Please also check out FJI correspondent Jon Frosch's reports from Cannes by visiting his blog.