CANNES, France (AP) — The annual Cannes festival on the French Riviera is the grandest platform in the world for the highest ambitions of film, a place where the art form is worshipped with wild passion and adoring reverence. Movies are projected pristinely in regal theaters, where they’re greeted by the world’s cinephiles with feverish excitement.

But even at this bastion of the big screen, director after director has come through preaching the opportunities of the small screen. Up and down the Croisette, talk of TV’s ascendance is rampant.

“The way that things are moving because of the financing of films, television has almost become where a lot of people seek creativity,” said Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, who premiered at the festival his Bangkok noir “Only God Forgives,” starring Ryan Gosling. “It’s opened up a whole new arena.”

Danish TV’s current quality has spread internationally (including “The Killing,” which was remade in America). Refn, the director of “Drive,” is working on his television debut, a version of the 1969 French science fiction film “Barbarella” for France’s Canal Plus.

Refn said that in the past 10 years, TV has leveled the field, creatively, and is now “sometimes much more satisfying than anything around.”

“I love television,” he said. “I love the size of it. I love to touch them. I like to watch them. I love the remote control. I love the power of the remote control. I love everything about the television.”

One of this year’s most notable films in competition won’t even be released theatrically in the U.S.: Steven Soderbergh‘s Liberace melodrama “Behind the Candelabra.” Hollywood studios passed on the film, which stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, suggesting that it was too gay to play at the box office. HBO picked up the $23 million film and will air it Sunday.

Soderbergh, long considered one of America’s finest filmmaking talents, is stepping away from moviemaking, but is enthusiastically moving into television. He’ll reportedly make a 10-episode series about a turn-of-the-century New York hospital, starring Clive Owen. (Soderbergh also produced the 2003 Washington, D.C., drama “K Street.”)

“There’s a lot of great stuff being made,” said Soderbergh. “You can go narrow and deep, and I like that. And this is all (“Sopranos” creator) David Chase. He single-handedly rebuilt the landscape. Anything that’s on now that’s any good is standing on his shoulders.”

“I don’t hear anybody talking about movies the way they talk about TV right now,” said Soderbergh.

But Cannes remains one of the great arguments for the vibrancy of movies. Year after year, it gathers together many of the world’s best films, and this year’s festival, the 66th, has been no different in that respect.

Audiences have been wowed by the Coen brothers’ wry melancholy (“Inside Llewyn Davis”), the classical skillfulness of James Gray (“The Immigrant”), the shambling grandeur of Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”) and many other sensory feasts. At Cannes, cinema is utterly alive.

But there are economic forces at work that have contributed to the shift. As audiences have becoming increasingly fractured, studios have concentrated more on enormous blockbusters. While advances in film equipment have made making a movie easier, getting it seen has become harder.

Director James Toback premiered at Cannes his “Seduced and Abandoned,” a documentary he made with Alec Baldwin. The two filmed their sometimes humiliating efforts to find financing — and the necessary marketing budget — for an adult drama. With appearances from Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski, the movie often feels like a funeral for the days of popular, dangerous movies.

“The movie business is tough, and it’s tougher now than ever,” said Baldwin, who largely stepped out of film to star in Tina Fey’s acclaimed sitcom “30 Rock.” ”Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever make another movie again.”

“Seduced and Abandoned,” fittingly, was picked up not for theatrical release, but by HBO. (The network will also broadcast another film at Cannes playing out of competition, Stephen Frears’ documentary “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight.”)

David Fincher‘s entry to television with the political thriller “House of Cards” for Netflix sent reverberations through the business, partly because Fincher is such a widely respected filmmaker.

But talent is increasingly flocking to TV because of acclaimed shows like “Mad Men,” ”Downton Abbey,” ”Girls,” ”Breaking Bad” and many others. The medium allows for more novelistic storytelling and, often, greater exposure.

“It’s nice for actors because more people see it,” said Kristin Scott Thomas, who stars in “Only God Forgives.” ”You can spend weeks and weeks and weeks making a film that very few people will see, and that’s sort of dispiriting.”

“It’s very satisfying when millions see something,” she added. “It’s as simple as that.”

Not everyone, though, endorsed TV at Cannes. The 87-year-old Jerry Lewis barked: “Never watch television, if you can help it.” Henri Behar, the moderator of Lewis’ press conference, noted that that was an appropriate sentiment at a film festival.

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

CANNES, France (AP) — Associated Press journalists open their notebooks at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival:

KEANU REEVES STEPS BEHIND THE LENS

The transition from actor to director was not an easy one for Keanu Reeves.

Reeves, who showed clips from his upcoming film “Man of Tai Chi” to a select crowd on Monday, said it took him a while to get into the director’s mindset.

“The first day of that was not too much fun,” he laughed during an interview.

“As an actor you are concerned with your role, you are concerned with your story,” he said. “The director’s side is much more other, it is looking out. … The first day I just didn’t quite have it. It wasn’t pleasurable.”

Reeves describes the movie, in which he also stars, as “a contemporary Kung Fu film.” The film is in Cantonese and English.

Reeves said he didn’t want to try his hand at directing until he had the right story. He found it while he was working on “The Matrix” franchise and was working closely with Chen Hu, a martial arts specialist.

“He is who the story is based around. He has a traditional past, he was a young person, Tai Chi champion, National Chinese champion,” Reeves said. “On the other hand, he is also a stunt man who has worked in Beijing and Hong Kong and Hollywood. He has gone out into the world.”

Reeves was one of many who grew up attracted to martial arts movies.

“For me, it was attractive in the sense of the physical-ness of it, maybe the independence, maybe the community,” he said. “For the Kung Fu it is the right and wrong, or the struggle that the characters often face, like ‘They’re going to shut down the temple’ or ‘They have killed your brother’ or ‘You’re being attacked’ and you have to defend or explore. And the exoticness of it, and they look cool.”

“Man of Tai Chi” is set for release in China this summer, with release dates in other countries pending.

— Sian Watson, http://www.twitter.com/sianwatson

AISHWARYA RAI‘S ROLES AS MOTHER, ACTRESS, MODEL & AMBASSAADOR

After taking time off to become a mother, Aishwarya Rai says she’s ready to sink her teeth back in to her movie career — as long it’s for the right role.

Rai, who gave birth to a daughter in 2011, said her time away from film has “flown by.”

Rai says her career choices from here on in will also have to fit in with her new family, even when it comes to doing press interviews.

“Right now I am talking to you while she is taking a nap,” she said during her interview at The Martinez Hotel in Cannes on Monday

“You just naturally discover how to do it because even, like everything else in my life you are just multi-tasking, you just figure out a way to schedule your life and that’s what I have been doing ever since motherhood.”

This is Rai’s 12th visit to the Cannes Film Festival. Beside being a L’Oreal brand ambassador, she was asked to be guest of honor at a special event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema.

“It’s very gracious of the festival to acknowledge it, to have an evening dedicated to celebrating it,” she said.

— Adam Egan, http://www.twitter.com/adamegan

A VERY INTIMATE PARTY IN HONOR OF JAMES FRANCO

The late-night party for James Franco’s “As I Lay Dying,” held in the compact luxury men’s clothing store Smalto, already promised to be a tight-knit affair. But the event became even more intimate with guests rubbing elbows — and much more — as the soiree went well above its capacity limit on Monday night.

Franco didn’t seem to mind the cramped quarters. Dressed in a tuxedo, he held court on a black leather couch, huddled up with good friend Ahna O’Reilly and others, laughing at one point as they looked at their phones.

The event was put on by the charity Art of Elysium, which provides entertainment for sick children in hospitals.

— Nekesa Mumbi Moody, http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi

CANNES, France (AP) — J.C. Chandor may just have saved someone’s life during an interview in Cannes.

The director who put Robert Redford in a struggle for survival as a capsized sailor in “All Is Lost” is talking about mortality when a gust of wind lifts a large beach umbrella from its base and sends it and its heavy metal pole sailing straight toward a publicist sitting nearby.

Chandor snatches the projectile from the air just in time, to gasps from onlookers.

The garrulous American director shrugs off the feat — “I have good eyes” — before resuming his flow of words about life, death and putting a screen icon through the emotional and physical wringer.

“This guy is essentially me in a weird way,” he said of the film’s central — and sole — character. “Someone asked me if it’s about my dad dying — my dad’s still alive. It’s about me dying. These are my feelings about this.”

“All Is Lost” is writer-director Chandor’s second feature, after Academy Award-nominated Wall St. drama “Margin Call.” You can’t accuse him of opting for an easy project.

Redford plays a sailor whose yacht is damaged in a collision with a shipping container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The film follows him over eight days as he tries, first, to repair his boat and sail on, then simply to survive in increasingly perilous conditions.

The cast consists of Redford and the elements, the set is the claustrophobic confines of a small boat on the open sea. And there is no dialogue. Apart from a few lines of voiceover at the start and an emphatic expletive, it’s a wordless film.

“There was certainly some ego” involved in that decision, Chandor said. “It seemed like a difficult and yet exciting thing to do.”

“I felt I could make a very, very compelling, dramatic, thrilling — hopefully — film, but then by the third act you have this very intense emotional experience about a guy essentially coming to grips with his own mortality right in front of your eyes,” he said. “It came to me that the best way to do that was just to have the audience experience what he was going through, so it was shot in a way that you were literally with him.”

Redford is key to the success of Chandor’s old-man-and-the sea story. The 76-year-old actor’s famous, weather-beaten face and aging but muscular physique help give the movie its compelling intensity.

Chandor met the star when “Margin Call” was selected for Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in 2011. He later sent Redford the “All Is Lost” script, and was surprised when the actor called back within a few days to set up a meeting.

“He said, ‘I just wanted to make sure you weren’t totally crazy. This thing is a little out there, but let’s do it.’”

Redford told reporters this week that making the film — “to have an experience where I could give myself over completely to a director” — was a thrill.

Chandor thinks he can see why.

“When an actor has been working for 40 years, and if you love movies he has so much baggage, that it’s almost hard for him at this point to take on a fresh role, because we have all these other ideas and his voice is so specific,” said Chandor — who skirted that obstacle by silencing the voice.

“There was something visceral in him wanting to do this material,” the director said. “He just came and gave himself to it fully. It was an amazing experience.”

“All Is Lost” is screening out of competition at the Cannes festival, which ends Sunday. Audiences and critics have been enthusiastic.

Trade paper Variety called it “that mainstream-movie rarity: a virtually wordless film that speaks with grave eloquence and simplicity about the human condition.” The Guardian newspaper said Redford “delivers a tour de force performance,” and the actor got a long standing ovation at the film’s premiere.

Chandor has had a dramatic career breakthrough in the past couple of years. He spent years directing commercials before making “Margin Call.”

There has been a lot of griping about the state of the film industry at this festival, but you won’t hear any of it from Chandor.

“You can make any movie you want in the world right now — but you can’t make it for $40 million,” he said. (“All Is Lost” cost $8.5 million).

“Every person on this pier has the means in their hand of making a movie of some sort, and … for the first time in the history of humanity there’s a distribution channel to get that art out there. All it comes down to is that there is a budget for every movie.

“Do I think we need to support the distribution challenge to get these out into the world? Of course. Do I think Hollywood is making the same stupid movie over and over again? Abso-freaking-lutely.

“But to say you can’t make a movie that you want today to me seems absurd. I could make a movie my whole career — I just didn’t have any stories worth telling.”

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Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

NEW YORK (AP) — Kid Rock is a scalper.

The 42-year-old Grammy winner, who is launching a summer tour where most tickets are priced at $20, said he’s scalping about 1,000 tickets from each show to make up for the cheaper regular price.

“I’m in the scalping business, but you know what? We told everyone. A lot of artists have been doing this for years behind fans’ backs, taking all these backdoor deals,” he said. “We look at StubHub and other places and see what they’re selling them for and we just undercut them.”

Kid Rock’s “$20 Best Night Ever Tour” kicks off June 28 in Bristow, Va., and the Detroit native, who released his debut album in 1990, said he likely scalped secretly on past tours.

“I’m sure we have,” he said. “I can’t say for sure, but I’m not going to say that we haven’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did.”

Kid Rock’s discount ticket pricing is leading a change in tours where scalpers play a major role as the marketplace for secondary sources for tickets continues to grow, especially in a summer when key acts like The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z are on the road.

“If I see a scalper, I’ll scalp him,” the Rolling Stones‘ Keith Richards said, laughing.

He said he would like to play free shows to balance the high cost for tickets; The Rolling Stones’ “50 & Counting Tour” has a range of ticket prices, and Pollstar reported that the average price of a ticket among the tour’s seven shows was $355.14.

“I’d do some free shows. I’d work my butt off and I don’t care how much. But these are set up above my head, man,” Richards said in a recent interview. “You’re kind of locked in a thing here whether you like it or not. I wish it was five bucks a ticket.”

The Rolling Stones did play a secret show at the Echoplex club in Los Angeles last month, where fans got in by winning a lottery and had to be ID’d and given photo bracelets to eliminate the chance of scalping the tickets, which were just $20.

But Mick Jagger said there isn’t much the artists can do about scalping and secondary sources for tickets.

“The artist is totally powerless in this. People have made a lot of fuss about it before, but on the other side, some people are like, ‘We might as well participate in it.’ And you can’t really blame the artist for participating in it because why shouldn’t they in a way?” he said. “I know we don’t participate in it, but nevertheless, I don’t blame people if they wanted to do it.”

“You can look at it like, ‘Well, no one’s making any money except these secondary ticket selling companies and they’re making more money than anyone,’” Jagger continued. “It’s completely legal so until it’s illegal, there’s nothing much anyone can do about that.”

Ticketmaster‘s North American President Jared Smith said Kid Rock’s deal, which he completed with Ticketmaster partner Live Nation, is a first of more to come, though they might not be as risky as Kid Rock’s plan, which also includes $4 draft beers and $20 T-shirts.

“I absolutely believe that we’re starting to see the real acceleration of some really healthy things in pricing that are going to create new opportunities for fans to come and experience it in a really special way,” Smith said.

A small way that artists have been able to control scalping is through paperless tickets, which only allows the buyers of the tickets to use them at shows and are not allowed to resell them. Smith said paperless tickets, which launched five years ago, accounts for “about 1 percent” of the tickets at Ticketmaster.

“It hasn’t grown necessarily as a percentage of the total tickets that we sell, but we certainly see more artists employing it,” Smith said. “When it really first started, it was kind of looked at as a tool to use across the entire seats in the arena, but it’s really become a tool for the best seats in the house. Increasingly we see artists using it very, very targeted for like the top 500 seats in the house or the top 1,000 seats.”

Bruce Springsteen, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Radiohead, Rascal Flatts, Selena Gomez, Muse, Miley Cryus, Iron Maiden, Atoms for Peace and Eric Church are among the acts using paperless tickets.

On his “Wrecking Ball World Tour” last year, Springsteen used paperless tickets for 20 percent of the seats, and Ticketmaster said its data showed that Springsteen’s decision helped reduce scalping by 75 percent. (New York is the only state where Springsteen couldn’t offer paperless tickets because the state does not allow nontransferable tickets).

StubHub, the largest reseller of tickets, said business is booming thanks to the top acts on the road as well as summer festivals. But the company, which has a partnership with AEG, knows the idea of paperless tickets hurts their business.

“That limits a person’s right to resell or transfer or to just give away their ticket. We do not support that because we believe in a fan’s right to do whatever they want with their tickets,” said Alison Salcedo, the head of U.S. Communications for StubHub. Fan Freedom, an organization that supports the rights of ticket holders, echoed StubHub’s thoughts on paperless tickets.

“I don’t see any reason why nontransferable tickets need to be the solution,” said Joe Potter, the CEO of Fan Freedom, which is financially supported by StubHub. “Scalpers get tickets through pre-sale and fan club memberships.”

Ticketmaster isn’t against the idea of reselling tickets, in fact they resell concert tickets online.

“More often or not tickets are underpriced, that’s why you see so much resell activity,” Smith said. “What we try to do is make sure it’s done very transparently.”

Ticket holders are allowed to sell tickets at any price on sites like StubHub and ticketsnow.com, that’s why Kid Rock isn’t selling tickets for the first two rows at his shows. He’s randomly pulling fans from the nose bleed sections to enjoy his concert from the venue’s best view. And the first 20 rows at his shows are seats offered through paperless ticketing.

“We really don’t know what we’re going to make yet. We were doing estimates on it and they’re already going through a lot of these numbers, and it looks like it’s going to be a good summer,” he said of what his potential tour earnings.

Kid Rock, whose tour openers include ZZ Top, Uncle Kracker and Kool and the Gang, is playing the same venues he’s performed at in the past, but he said he’s filling up more seats and selling tickets faster. Even scalpers have approached the performer to cut deals.

“I’ve had people in the scalping business come at me already and try to make side deals like, ‘I can make you thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash if you’ll just flip a few of these tickets our way for certain shows,’” he recalled.

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Follow Mesfin Fekadu at http://www.twitter.com/MusicMesfin

CAP D’ANTIBES, France (AP) — With an apt rendition of “Gold-finger,” singing legend Shirley Bassey roused celebrity-revelers to dig deep into their pockets at the 20th amfAR gala in the Cap D’Antibes Thursday, helping to raise an estimated $25 million for AIDS research.

The British-born singer was one of several performers including Duran Duran who sang at the gold-themed auction event nearby the Cannes Film Festival, hosted by actress Sharon Stone, and held at the French Riviera’s exclusive Hotel Du Cap over-looking the sea. The annual amfAR gala has for two decades attracted the film and fashion industries’ rich and powerful — and this year was no exception, with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein — perhaps the Hollywood equivalent of the Midas touch — Leonardo DiCaprio, Jessica Chastain, Janet Jackson, Milla Jovovich and Goldie Hawn sitting side by side. Stone, a pushy but charismatic host, is started to earn herself a legendary status presiding over the amfAR event, since the passing of its founder Elizabeth Taylor in 2011.

“I heard that somebody might go into outer space tonight. Maybe a rumor, maybe not,” said Weinstein before the auction.

He was not wrong. Items sold under the hammer did indeed include a trip to space, but also more terrestrial items such as an Andy Warhol lithograph of Taylor, a chance to have a family portrait taken by iconic photographer Annie Leibovitz, a week in fashion designer’s Donna Karan’s Caribbean hide-away and a shimmering 53-carat diamond necklace.

The gala’s excess remained just a front to one of the world’s biggest fundraisers in the fight against AIDS, a disease that amfAR says still affect some 34 million people worldwide.

“Yes, you can think it’s a silly little dinner, you can deride it as full of celebrities dressed up,” said Leibovitz, whose photo of Niagara Falls also sold at auction. “But that’s missing the point. 80 million dollars amfAR has raised since it began. That’s the point. It has saved lives.”

Harvey Weinstein took the mike several times to praise the film industry’s commitment to AIDS stressing that while two decades ago the illness was a “looming plague,” now a cure might well be seen within “our lifetime.”

Reminders of the serious nature of the event didn’t manage to stop the fun, however.

For the second time in amfAR’s history, the event’s penchant for excess translated rather well into a glimmering catwalk show — curated by stylist Carine Roitfeld. It featured some 38 gold and black looks from designers such as Dior, Chanel, Lanvin and Prada worn by models such as Karlie Kloss Karolina Kurkova, Angela Lindvall and Alessandra Ambrosio Models who strutted on a catwalk between dining tables. The standout dresses were a custom gold embroidered long sleeve gown courtesy of Valentino, and a custom gold pleated mini dress from Givenchy. All the dresses went under the hammer to a single bidder, selling in just a couple of minutes for a staggering $1.56 million.

Thought celebrities were in a generous mood, news that thieves outsmarted 80 security guards and made off with a necklace that creators say is worth a staggering 2 million euros ($2.6 million) — the second such jewelry heist during this year’s Cannes Film Festival — had celebrities clinging more closely onto their jewels.

“Well yeah, I’m going to be watching how much champagne I drink,” said Jovovich, smiling. “Because you never know somebody might come up and just shwoop, take it off.”

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Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP