Cannes goes bananas

Crazed fans too intense for Salma Hayek
Sunday May 23, 1999
By BRUCE KIRKLAND -- Toronto Sun

CANNES -- The crazed fans surging through the streets at the Cannes Film Festival are getting to Salma Hayek. "Crowds hitting the cars!" she yelped yesterday as she sat to lunch for interviews about her role in Dogma, American Kevin Smith's absurdist comedy about the Catholic religion. "And the cars are going so hard. People are going to get run over. It's crazy."

"They love you!" intones Ben Affleck, one of her Dogma co-stars. "They just want to talk to you." But the intensity is too much for Hayek. Thousands of people jammed the streets of Cannes yesterday, especially around the entrances to major hotels, including the Martinez where the interviews took place. "I think it's different in L.A.," Hayek said. "They're more used to it (seeing stars)."

In Cannes the fanaticism of fans is more like what she sees happen in Mexico, her home country. "In Mexico, they're very passionate about their people. They're more aggressive." But that aggression can be controlled, Hayek said. When she shot another 1999 Cannes filmfest film -- Mexican director Arturo Ripstein's Nobody Writes To The Colonel, which she also co-produced -- the filming took place in a Mexican village. "People were not rude. They were very respectful." In Cannes, fans literally jump up on the official limousines, banging on the roof, driving their fists into the windows, pushing their own faces up to the tinted glass trying to get a glimpse of who's inside. When it's Salma Hayek, she's scared.