Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby
Warner Bros.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan are expected to attend the French festival’s opening night, as their film The Great Gatsby – Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant take on the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel – will kick off the festivities May 15.
DiCaprio, 38, who has not made an official Cannes appearance since 2007, and Mulligan, 27, are expected to be joined by other cast members, including Isla Fisher, Joel Edgerton and Tobey Maguire, who plays the Jazz Age novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway.
“I am very proud to return to a country and a festival that has always been generous with me,” said Luhrmann, whose previous films Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge have appeared at Cannes. “And happy to see this film screened at Cannes, not far from Saint-Raphaël, where Scott Fitzgerald wrote one of the most poignant passages and most moving of his extraordinary novel.”
Gatsby, with a score by Jay Z and The Bullitts, will be screened in 3-D, only the second opening-night selection to do so, and the first ever for a live-action film. Pixar’s Up! opened the 2009 festival.
With DiCaprio officially on board – the actor has been coming to Cannes incognito for nearly 20 years, since starring in Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet – organizers are hoping to arrange a preview of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street as well.
