CANNES, France (AP) — Shooting the Midwest in monochrome came naturally for Alexander Payne in his father-son road trip “Nebraska.”

Payne premiered his black-and-white follow-up to “The Descendants” on Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the gentle tale drew largely enthusiastic reviews for both its warmth and its colorless cinematography.

“It just seemed like the right thing to do for this film,” Payne told reporters Thursday at the French Riviera festival. “I always wanted to make a film in black and white. It’s such a beautiful form. It really left our cinema because of commercial, not artistic reasons.”

“This modest, austere story seemed to lend itself to being made in black and white,” he added.

“Nebraska” stars Bruce Dern as an aging father, whose son (Will Forte) drives him from Montana to Nebraska to placate his father’s delusional belief that he’s won $1 million from a mass mailing.

Particularly in black and white, it’s an unsentimental, melancholy portrait of a decaying American heartland — its drab bars, roadside motels and paint-chipped farm houses. In noting the appropriateness of black and white for such a landscape, Payne called the movie “a Depression-era film.”

The approach — never seen as exactly a box-office draw — took negotiating with Paramount, which will release “Nebraska” in November.

“It took some discussions with the studio, Paramount in this case, to get them to agree to let me make it in black and white,” Payne said. “We did settle on a budget less than it would have been had the film been in color, but still at a rate I felt comfortable to make a decent film.”

The film marks a kind of homecoming for Payne, a Nebraska native, whose recent films have been set in Hawaii (the Oscar-winning “The Descendants”) and California (the Napa Valley road trip “Sideways”). Payne’s first three films (“Citizen Ruth,” ”Election” and “About Schmidt”) were all in his home state.

“If I weren’t from Nebraska, I wouldn’t have made this film at all, because I’m sure the script never would have come to me,” Payne said, referring to Bob Nelson’s screenplay. “If it were called ‘Iowa,’ maybe I would have gotten it.”

Payne first read the script nine years ago.

“I had the script for this while I was making ‘Sideways,’ but I was so sick and tired of shooting in cars by the time ‘Sideways’ was finished, I didn’t want to make this one right away,” he said. “That’s why it’s been 10 years.”

The last notable film in black and white to premiere at Cannes was the 2011 silent film ode and best-picture winning “The Artist.” Payne’s were from another movie era, though, taking inspiration from Peter Bogdanovich’s stark 1970s black-and-white “Paper Moon” and “The Last Picture Show.”

“One thing I like about this story is the son wishes to give the aging father some dignity,” Payne said. “My parents are in the home stretch and that was very personal to me.”

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer 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

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian court has denied parole to a member of the Pussy Riot punk group.

In its ruling Thursday, the court accepted a claim by prosecutors that Maria Alekhina had systematically disobeyed prison authorities and failed to repent for her crime, Russian media reported.

Alekhina went on a hunger strike Wednesday after being barred from the court hearing in Perm province, and she ordered her defense not to participate.

Band members Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich gained worldwide notoriety last year when a Moscow court jailed them for two years for conducting a punk protest in Moscow’s main cathedral.

Samtusevich was later released on appeal.

Alekina’s lawyer said she would appeal Thursday’s court’s decision.

A court in the province of Mordovia denied Tolokonnikova parole last month.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Over the years, curators at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum have occasionally had trouble coaxing reluctant stars to help put together major exhibitions. Not so with members of The Rolling Stones, who made time in their packed anniversary schedule to help.

“Rolling Stones: 50 Years of Satisfaction,” opening Friday and running through March 2014, covers two floors at the museum and contains scores of personal items.

“The timing was right,” associate curator Craig Inciardi said. “Ordinarily, you would think that working on an exhibit while the artists are getting ready for a major tour would be a bad thing. In this case, it worked to our advantage in that they were all getting together, spending time making decisions in the same room. … We ended up getting their full cooperation.”

The interactive exhibit honoring Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the band’s other members is a tribute to their work, worldwide musical impact and continued relevance.

It’s more than a celebration. In fact, it’s a gas.

With nearly 300 artifacts on display, the exhibit chronicles the band from its birth in England as a blues cover band to its current “50 and Counting” tour. Rare guitars, stage outfits, concert posters, documents and personal items fill two floors.

After stepping through a doorway framed like the Stones’ iconic tongue-and-lips logo — omnipresent in various shapes and sizes on the museum’s fifth and sixth floors — visitors are taken back to the band’s early days, even before founder Brian Jones, Jagger, Richards, Ian Stewart, Mick Taylor and Charlie Watts played their first gig.

There are gems of Stones’ history interspersed throughout the exhibit. Impeccably mounted behind glass, the treasure trove of items includes:

— Fan questionnaires filled out in the early 1960s by the band. On his, Jagger listed his likes as “girls, eating, clothes” and dislikes as “intolerant people, having my hair cut.”

— A silver serving tray the band “allegedly” stole from Station Hotel during a night of beer drinking.

— Jones’ custom Vox teardrop guitar and Ronnie Wood’s Zemaitis electric six-string, which has personalized etchings carved into the silver facing.

— Jagger’s floor-length cape stitched out of U.S. and British flags that he wore on the 1981-82 tour.

— The 1970 letter the Stones sent to Santana, asking for permission to use footage of the band’s performance at the infamous Altamont concert, which eventually became the film “Gimme Shelter.”

— The original artwork for “It’s Only Rock and Roll” and “Their Satanic Majesties Request.”

However, this is hardly a staid stroll through display cases and wall hangings. With this exhibit, the hall is hoping to entertain, educate and enlighten.

For the first time, visitors can be included in the show with the launch of an interactive project where fans can share photos — the hall has lifted a ban on picture-taking in the exhibit — and other memorabilia at a multimedia display and online. Fans can upload images to Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag (hash)rockhallsatisfaction to contribute.

“This gave us an opportunity to engage the fans a little bit more,” said Todd Mesek, vice president of communications. “‘OK, show us your experience with the Stones. Show us your tickets, show us your set lists, show us your concert photos. What we’re also doing with our new photo policy is letting fans take shots in here and send it out to the world, let them be a part of it.”

The exhibit includes three iPad-based interactive kiosks where visitors can put on a pair of headphones and hear the band’s early blues influences, explore the Jagger-Richards songwriting team and see how the band melded influences into its one-of-a-kind sound.

“We wanted to take visitors deeper into the sounds of the Stones and their music and hear it in a way they’ve never heard it before,” said Jason Hanley, the hall’s director of education. “… We had to think about ‘how do we get 50 years of music into three different stations?’ So we came up with the idea of focusing on them as real innovators who were always looking at the world around them and pulling in new things.”

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Online:

http://rockhall.com

NEW YORK (AP) — Lea Michele has stories to share about the many auditions she has passed.

The “Glee” actress has a deal with Harmony Books, a Random House Inc. imprint. Harmony Books announced Thursday that “Brunette Ambition” will come out in the spring of 2014. The publisher is billing the book as a combination memoir, style guide and advice book.

The 26-year-old Michele is best known as the ever-striving Rachel Berry on “Glee.” She also starred in the Broadway production “Spring Awakening” and the film “New Year’s Eve.”