Toronto International Film Festival: Illegal Immigrant

Shoeshine Man Dept: Such was the case at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, when French actor Andre Wilms sat down to discuss the work of his friend and director Aki Kaurismaki. The Finnish filmmaker's 16th feature, Le Havre, is also the fifth time he has worked with Wilms, according to Vancouver Sun. Kaurismaki's films espouse a minimalism that actors enlarge upon at their peril. Wilms remembers emoting in one scene with his co-star, Blondin Miguel, who plays an illegal immigrant delivered by container ship to the port city of the film's title. Kaurismaki wanted none of it. "He said: 'Do you want to win an Oscar? It's too late.'" It can be difficult, in the maelstrom that is a film festival, to get a bead on what makes a director tick. Trickier still when the interview is in English, but the subject feels more comfortable in French. And almost impossible when conducted, not through an interpreter, but an actor. "He doesn't talk a lot," Wilms says. "He says to me, 'Please Andre, play like an old gentleman.' That's the first sentence. The second sentence: 'Don't be pathetic; never!'" Wilms stars as Marcel Marx, a genial if impoverished shoeshine man who blithely steals bread from his local bakery, but with such gentility that no one seems to mind. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.