Photo: Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images
Call it superstition. Call it a matter of cinematic ritual. But Neon chief Tom Quinn refuses to attend the Cannes Film Festival’s awards ceremony. Never mind that his “upstart indie” studio’s films — Best Picture Oscar nominees Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall among them — have claimed the Palme d’Or at every Cannes since 2019. Quinn habitually skips the presentation and instead watches the doling out of top prizes on a live TV feed from the second-floor “grandma’s attic” suite at the Croisette’s Hotel Splendid.
He did the same when, five years ago, writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite — which Neon had acquired for North American distribution in 2018, prior to Cannes — scored an upset victory over Quentin Tarantino’s film. “Parasite screened the same day as Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Quinn recalls. “We were surrounded by these juggernauts. I didn’t expect to win the Palme d’Or. I didn’t go to the awards — and we won! And so I’ve just subsequently done the same thing every year … When I show up, we’re going to lose. Certainly.”
Ergo, the chief executive did not personally witness this year’s Palme win by writer-director Sean Baker’s Anora: yet another film Neon produced and scheduled for North American distribution long before it reached Cannes. That makes a staggering five Palmes in a row for the scrappy studio now primarily known as modern Hollywood’s foremost purveyor of foreign films (its French Belgian body-horror-thriller Titane won the Palme d’Or in 2021 and Parasite, of course, shocked the entertainment ecosystem by becoming the first Korean-language movie to win a Best Picture Oscar). “I’m sort of in shock about it because it defies the laws of physics,” Quinn says of the latest win d’Or, having recently returned from the south of France. “I mean, how is this possible? But it is possible because we believe in the same things as the jury — the Cannes selection committee and the things we do — so I take great comfort in that.”
Quinn has been attending the festival for 28 years as a top exec for companies including Radius-TWC, Magnolia Pictures, and Samuel Goldwyn, and according to him, there is a unique process of elimination that allows insiders to figure out which films will land on the Palme short list (or alternately qualify for Cannes’s other top prizes such as the Grand Prix, Jury Prize, and Un Certain Regard) ahead of the festival’s closing ceremony. “You know the list of the final seven or eight films by Saturday morning,” he says, with the awards historically being issued on the last Sunday in May. “There’s murmur around Cannes: some hearsay, some based on actual intel. You know who’s been told to stay in town to attend the awards ceremony. So someone saying ‘I saw X at the airport,’ that gives you one indicator. Or ‘X is still staying in their hotel.’ But you don’t know who is going to win what.”
Then, at the ceremony, comes what Quinn describes as the “Miss Universe statute,” where the precursor award winners are knocked out of Palme d’Or contention: “They announce all the runners-up and it eliminates all but the contenders.”
Both a critical hit and an old-fashioned audience-pleaser, Neon’s 2024 Palme winner, Anora, is a sex farce–cum–fairy tale plotted around the unvarnished lives of sex workers — strippers, escorts (several portrayed by real-life professionals) — that Variety, in its review, noted “makes Pretty Woman look like a Disney movie.” It arrives as the first American title to claim Cannes’s top award since Terrence Malick’s ponderous coming-of-age drama The Tree of Life in 2011 but also the fruition of a long cinematic courtship between Neon and Baker. (A24 triumphed over Neon in a bidding war to purchase distribution rights to the filmmaker’s 2017 drama The Florida Project and also won rights to Baker’s 2021 swinging-dick dramedy Red Rocket, having purchased the film at script stage.)
Considering four of Neon’s five Palme d’Or winners made it to the Oscars winners circle as Best Picture nominees (with Parasite winning the prize), and factoring in the increasing cruciality of awards benediction to Neon’s art-house audience, Anora’s Cannes love is no trivial matter. Neon has released all its Palme winners in the prime awards-season corridor of October, and Quinn confirms Anora is scheduled to theatrically roll out in the fall.
Beyond its awards prospects, Quinn sees the movie in a continuum of American independent cinema that gained traction at Cannes before finding mainstream appeal in theaters: David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape all won the Palme d’Or before going on to register robust box-office returns. “There’s a nice link between those films and this,” Quinn says. “If there’s anything to be said about the status of the American auteur, I think it might be that.”
