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

A DIFFERENT TUNE FOR TIMBERLAKE

In the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” Justin Timberlake sings music set to a very different beat than “Suit and Tie.”

Timberlake plays a bearded pop folkie in the film, which was to premiere Sunday night at the Cannes Film Festival, about the music scene of early 1960s Greenwich Village. Oscar Isaac stars as a more serious but less successful folk musician than Timberlake’s smiley Jim Berkey.

Speaking to reporters Sunday, Timberlake called Berkey “part of the transition that is sort of the underbelly of the time.” The film summons the period of New York folk just before Bob Dylan arrived in the early ’60.

“Obviously, it’s on the surface, a different style from the music that I make in real life,” said Timberlake. “But listen, man. I grew up in Tennessee, the home of the blues, the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll — Memphis — and a lot of country music. So my first musical lessons were given to me by my grandfather an old Gibson guitar. He taught me how to fingerpick.”

Timberlake helped write the music to the film’s most comical song, “Please, Mr. Kennedy,” which he sings with Isaac and Adam Driver of “Girls.” The oft-repeated chorus goes: “Please, Mr. Kennedy, don’t shoot me into outer space.”

Timberlake got reflective about the curious mix of talent, luck and timing that goes into a music act breaking out. In contrast to the success Timberlake has had in music and acting, the characters of “Llewyn Davis” are those for whom things never click.

“I’ve been in the right place and met the wrong people, and I’ve been in the wrong place and met the right people,” the former boy band singer said. “Usually, the second one ends up being the thing that can catapult someone’s career.”

Timberlake suggested disregarding how one’s work is received.

“There’s a lot of analysis now, a lot of analytics on what might be success and what might be failure,” he said. “I don’t know that I would measure the success or failure of it by how it’s perceived because once it’s done, it’s sort of out there. You have to let it live in the ether.”

— Jake Coyle, http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

Young British actor George MacKay is making a splash at Cannes — literally, amid the weekend’s torrential downpours — with his compelling central performance in mythic maritime drama “For Those In Peril.”

Set in a fishing town on the stark Scottish coast, Paul Wright’s debut feature stars 21-year-old MacKay as sole survivor of a boat accident that killed five others, including his elder brother. MacKay carries the intense and poetic film as a young man struggling to cope with loss, even as his survival alienates him from his bereaved neighbors.

“You got our film and our weather, too,” MacKay joked, sitting in a wind-whipped beachside cafe during interviews for the film in Cannes.

Playing in Cannes’ Critics’ Week competition, the movie has garnered strong reviews for its exploration of guilt, masculinity and mythology.

It’s a mature and meaty role for MacKay, who got his movie start aged 10 as one of the Lost Boys in P.J. Hogan’s 2003 adaptation of “Peter Pan,” shot at Warner Bros’ studios on Australia’s Gold Coast.

“It was mad. They built a pirate ship — it was extraordinary. I think, the fact that we were 10, I don’t think we realized how ridiculous the scale (was),” said MacKay, who also appeared alongside Clive Owen in 2009 family drama “The Boys Are Back.”

“For Those in Peril” was a much smaller-scale operation, shot over six weeks in a small town in northeast Scotland — and, for several key sequences, in the cold North Sea.

The boundlessly enthusiastic MacKay says even the frigid water scenes were made bearable by “lots of cups of tea … lots of towels, lots of food.”

“We were kept safe,” he said. “We were out in the middle of the ocean doing it and we had the water safety guys come — very dramatic — shooting across in their little (boat), whack you out and wrap you in towels. It was all good.”

And the town had a bonus: “Best fish and chips you’ve ever had.”

—Jill Lawless, http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

NEW YORK (AP) — Steven Soderbergh is working on a new currency.

In his Chelsea studio, among various film posters and piles of moviemaking mementos, he has a few paintings in progress, including a new, livelier, “more Hendrix” version of a U.S. dollar bill. It’s only one of the many artistic endeavors he bounces between now that he’s begun his long-predicted hiatus from filmmaking.

On Tuesday, he will bring his Liberace film, “Behind the Candelabra,” to the Cannes Film Festival, where it will compete for the same Palme d’Or he won 24 years ago for his first film, “Sex, Lies and Videotape.”

Soderbergh has said this — a $23 million HBO movie starring Michael Douglas as the flamboyant pianist and Matt Damon as his lover, Scott Thorson, airing Sunday in the U.S. — will be his last film, at least for now. The 50 year-old’s career in film — 26 protean features including “Out of Sight,” ”Traffic” and the “Ocean’s” franchise — will effectively conclude in Cannes, the same place it was internationally launched.

“It’s not often you get the opportunity to arrange that kind of symmetry,” Soderbergh says. “It’s funny to think about how long ago that was.”

Shortly after Soderbergh began tweeting a sparse novella and gave a remarkable speech at the San Francisco Film Festival in which he vented his frustration at Hollywood studios, he sat for a lengthy interview as he steps away from movies. “In theory,” he says, “I’m finished.”

AP: When you look back on your filmography, what do you think of it?

Soderbergh: It feels like one big movie to me, like chapters of a novel. There’s continuity. There’s evolution. I shot “Sex, Lies” in 35 days and “Candelabra” in 30 days. I’m more economical. I’d probably make them all a few minutes shorter. Shorter is always better.

AP: The break from movies you’ve long talked about is now effectively underway. How’s it going?

Soderbergh: It’s been a little quieter for me. My wanting to consider what my relationship to movies is can sort of happen while I’m doing this other stuff. . It’s hard for me to do nothing.

AP: You’ve recently tweeted a novella, “Glue,” and given a wide-ranging speech about how Hollywood could function better.

Soderbergh: It was kind of an opportunity to organize in one place a lot of thing I’ve either said in interviews or bars. It was just a way for me to structure it all, get it out and close the door on it. . As I walked out the door, I felt there were some things I wanted to memorialize about what I’ve seen.

AP: It felt like a goodbye.

Soderbergh: I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how I can optimize my process as a filmmaker, and I haven’t seen a lot of effort expended on the part of the studios to optimize their process. And I don’t understand it. . The biggest stumbling block to this paradigm being revised is the cost of putting a mainstream movie out. It’s truly the tail that’s wagging the dog. It’s influencing every decision at every level. I can’t believe — unless there’s some aspect of the relationship between the studios and the theater owners that I’m not aware of — that this is the only way it can be done.

AP: Is your stepping back motivated equally by industry frustration and by your desire to grow in some new way as a filmmaker?

Soderbergh: Yeah, absolutely, it’s a combination of a lot of different things. Some of them have to do with the way the business is working now, some of them have to do with me just wanting a break from the social aspect of it. The fact that you’re the target for tens of thousands of questions. It’s a very intense process and you can feel worn down after a while. And then my own feelings just about the grammar of it, the language of it: Is there some other way to transmit and release information that isn’t so prescribed? It’s quite possible that I could end up making something that is designed more to be seen in a museum than a movie theater.

AP: Was there something you were bumping up against that made you feel like you weren’t evolving?

Soderbergh: It felt like: I need to tear everything down and start over. I’ve been thinking about that and thinking about what it might be. I want to take advantage of what people bring to a movie when they watch a movie. The fact that we’re so image driven and that we’ve been watching images since we were infants, and we have associations that are carried with them. I want to figure out a way to take advantage of that, so that I’m sort of using those associations as fuel for what I want to do. I think that’s going to require me taking some time to think about what those associations are, how I can use them, how I can build off of them, how I can subvert them. And see if there’s some way that I can reverse engineer a narrative in which you, by the end of it, understand everything that happened but you’re not quite sure how or why you did.

AP: It seems your search for a new kind of narrative is connected to what you’ve said about the confusing, fractured nature of life today.

Soderbergh: Especially in this country now, it’s really hard not to look around and go: What the hell is going on? Is it possible to get anything done? Is the center of this country going to hold or is it just going to be completely marginalized by extremists on every side of every issue? I don’t know. I’m alarmed.

AP: The private sexuality of “Behind the Candelabra” bears some similarities to “Sex, Lies.”

Soderbergh: It was a great way to express my appreciation for a kind of movie I’ve watched my whole life but never got to make, which is kind of a melodrama. I looked at as being in line with all the Douglas Sirk movies and “Sunset Blvd.” and “All About Eve” and “Valley of the Dolls.” . It was interesting to look around and wonder when I’ll be doing this again.

AP: What will you miss the most?

Soderbergh: Editing.

AP: What’s surprising about you stepping away from filmmaking is that you seem to relish the process so much, shooting and editing your own films.

Soderbergh: I have a plan. I have an idea of how it can go, and I’m willing to throw it all out at a moment’s notice to go somewhere else with it. I expect to discover things. I expect accidents. I expect something that somebody suggests or says will move me in another direction. I’m creating an environment in order to conjure that kind of things. I want my experience of making something to be fluid and to be surprising. I want it to come alive in front of me.

AP: Some filmmakers spend years carefully constructing the films they hope will be masterpieces. That kind of approach has never been appealing to you?

Soderbergh: No, mostly because it makes my work worse. I discovered early on, the more time I had to mull something over, the worse it got — or the more insular it got, the more introspective, the more self-conscious. I needed to treat it like a sport.

AP: HBO picked up “Candelabra” after no studio would take it, and you’re currently contemplating several TV projects. Are you excited about television?

Soderbergh: Very. Very. There’s a lot of great stuff being made. You can go narrow and deep, and I like that. And this is all 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. . Knowing that I can’t swim upstream forever, it seems to me that if I want to work, that I need to move to a medium in which the way I like to do things is viewed as a positive and not a negative.

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

CANNES, France (AP) — Director Takashi Miike says shooting an action movie in Japan is a lot harder than it looks.

His Cannes Film Festival entry “Shield of Straw” is a robust thriller about a team of police tasked with escorting a child-killer with a bounty on his head across the country.

Although touched with serious themes of loyalty and duty, it’s an old-fashioned action flick, bursting with car chases, gunfights and explosions to rival anything from Hollywood.

The director says he felt Japanese cinema had lost the art of making “spectacular scenes — so I gave myself a challenge.”

He succeeded, but only after traveling to Taiwan to film. He said Monday that in Japan, “it was impossible to close down the highways and get so many police cars on the road.”

CANNES, France (AP) — Playing a Freudian analyst helped Mathieu Amalric overcome his fear and loathing of psychotherapy.

The French actor depicts a maverick academic counseling Benicio Del Toro‘s Native American war vet in “Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian,” director Arnaud Desplechin‘s Cannes Film Festival contender.

Based on a true case study from the late 1940s, it’s the story of two men — doctor and patient — who go on difficult journeys into their own minds.

Amalric says he went on a similar trip himself. Before making the movie, psychoanalysis “frightened me so much that I rejected it, because my parental culture that told me maybe psychoanalysis had to do with weakness.”

“You are not supposed to show weakness. You are supposed to ‘be a man’ … That’s what my father would think of psychoanalysis.”

What the 47-year-old actor found through the movie was something different — “a world of adventure: of research, of physical danger and how the body and the mind expand.”

Analysts could put that on their calling cards. No wonder Desplechin says the movie is “a manifesto for psychoanalysis,” as well “a film about a man who needs to heal his own soul.”

Amalric — most famous internationally as the villain in James Bond adventure “Quantum of Solace” — plays real-life French analyst Georges Devereux, who moved to the United States in the 1930s. He spent time living with Mojave Indians and helped develop the field of ethnopsychiatry, which studies the ways mental illness is understood in different cultural contexts.

Del Toro is his patient Jimmy Picard, who returned from World War II service in France with a head injury and debilitating psychological symptoms his doctors were unable to diagnose.

One of 20 films competing for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the movie is a trans-Atlantic hybrid — an American story told by a French writer-director with a cast including Amalric, Puerto Rico-born Del Toro and British actress Gina McKee as Devereux’s sophisticated love interest.

Desplechin says he sees it less as a specifically American tale than as a story of displaced people: both Jimmy, living on a Montana reservation, and Devereux, who initially struggled to find support for his ideas in the U.S.

Amalric, one of France’s busiest actors, is such a Cannes darling he once appeared in three competition films in the same year. This year he’s in two — “Jimmy P.” and Roman Polanski’s “Venus in Fur.”

He says he enjoyed his time as a fish out of water filming in the U.S. “Jimmy P.” was shot in Monroe, Michigan, a place Amalric remembers with a shudder of Gallic horror: “There was nothing there. Nothing.”

“It was very intense, and the situation of the shooting itself made it even stronger, the fact that we would live all together in a hotel where there was nothing to do,” he said during an interview on a Cannes rooftop terrace that would be idyllic if not for a bitter wind off the Mediterranean. “It was very close to the situation they were living in the middle of nothing.”

The actor and Del Toro share a strong onscreen bond in the talk-heavy film. For long stretches the movie is an intense two-hander, with the slight Amalric and the beefy Del Toro making a compelling double act. Del Toro plays Jimmy with stoic understatement, while Amalric’s Devereux is a piano-playing bundle of energy.

Amalric said he was initially surprised by Del Toro’s working method. The actor didn’t like to socialize off the set, or to rehearse — a technique Amalric now says turned out to be invaluable.

“During psychoanalysis, the words surprise you,” he said. “You don’t know why these words are coming out. But an actor is supposed to know his lines by heart, so you have this paradox.

“I didn’t understand it,” he said. “I understood it yesterday after seeing the film.”

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

HONG KONG (AP) — Fans know her as the sweet schoolgirl in the 2011 blockbuster “You Are the Apple of My Eye.” Now, they can take a closer look at Michelle Chen through her first love: music.

After she graduated from the University of Southern California and returned home to Taiwan, her initial attempts to break into the island’s music scene hit a brick wall. But trying acting at the advice of a talent manager, she landed a few film and television roles, then shot to stardom with “You Are the Apple of My Eye.”

The 29-year-old actress said she poured her heart and soul into her first studio album, “Me Myself and I.”

“It is really an album about me because I wrote most of the songs. I wrote the lyrics. And I wrote this album about my family and friends, my. maybe lovers,” Chen told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

One song is written to her fans, and she says “I think the audience can really, really get to know who Michelle Chen is through the album.”

Crediting the late Mandarin pop legend Teresa Teng as one of her major musical influences, Chen said that she wrote one of the songs on the album as a tribute to Teng and also to a close family member who introduced her to Teng’s music.

“Uncle Grandpa’s Small City Story” is a tribute to the first pop song Chen listened to, Teng’s “Small Town Story’,” because it was a favorite of Chen’s uncle grandpa.

Chen sang part of “Small City Story” on her own song and says she was amazed while studying Teng’s live performances.

“When I was trying how to sing that song, you will realize how much detail that she put into the song, like maybe in one sentence with three words, she has to make three different turns (vibrato three of four times),” Chen said. “No wonder she is like the diva of the century.”

Some fans who were holding their breath to see how Chen would follow up her success on “You Are the Apple of My Eye” were surprised that she chose to switch gears and start fresh in music. Chen finds that both a burden and a blessing.

“It’s very lucky because now people kind of know me already, so I get to have the chance to release my album and a lot of people will pay more attention to my album,” she said.

But with every performance, “people seem to magnify everything I do.” She said she hopes to look for the bright side. “I just hope that every time I try to sing, more people will hear that I can do it.”

She’s performing in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia to promote the album.