Cannes staffer breaks silence on red carpet run-in with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson

Tom Hanks was notably absent from this morning’s Asteroid City photo-call in Cannes after clearing up the red carpet run-in he and his wife had with a staffer at the movie’s premiere last night.

Hanks, one of the world’s biggest stars, and his wife Rita Wilson were photographed with  pointed fingers in the face of Vincent Chapalain at the Wes Anderson film premiere last night.

Rita was last night quick to clear up the confusion, insisting she and Tom simply couldn’t hear what the man was saying. Shortly afterwards, Chapalain – who has worked at the festival for ten years – came forward to corroborate her story.

‘They simply asked me if they should return to the start of the carpet with the rest of the film crew (I am not security.)

‘And with the cries of photographers, they needed to speak loudly,’ he said on Twitter.

Innocent as the run-in may have been, Hanks was notably absent from the well-attended photo-call where co-stars Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and others lapped up applause today.

And while the red carpet interaction wasn’t as tense as it first appeared, Hanks has been known to have a short fuse in the past.

Last June, Hanks was seen screaming at photographers to ‘back the f*** off!’ after a tense interaction in Manhattan, where a paparazzi bumped into Wilson in a media scrum.

Tuesday’s interaction might have been innocent – but Hanks was notably absent from the Asteroid City photo-call on Wednesday.

Co-stars Bryan Cranston and Scarlett Johansson were seen checking their phones at the event.

‘Is that Anderson giving the finger to those who sneer at the stylised dysfunction of his characters? “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” goes a mantra repeated by the cast in another scene.

‘Is the director referring to the importance of forgetting your cynicism and surrendering to the whimsy? If so, where do I sign?’

The film has received rave reviews.

In his four-star write-up, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote: ‘Asteroid City’s eccentricity, its elegance, its gaiety, and its sheer profusion of detail within the tableau frame make it such a pleasure. So, too, does its dapper styling of classic American pop culture.

‘With every new shot, your eyes dart around the screen, grabbing at all the painterly little jokes and embellishments, each getting a micro-laugh.

‘The movie rattles cleverly and exhilaratingly along, adroitly absorbing the implications of pathos and loneliness without allowing itself to slow down. It is tempting to consider this savant blankness as some kind of symptom, but I really don’t think so: it is the expression of style. And what style it is.’

The Time’s Ed Pottom gave a four-star review which read: ‘Some lines feel like pops at Anderson’s detractors. Johansson’s femme-fatale actress, recovering from an abusive marriage, says she and Augie are “two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of their passion . . . because they don’t want to”.

‘Is that Anderson giving the finger to those who sneer at the stylized dysfunction of his characters? “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” goes a mantra repeated by the cast in another scene.

‘Is the director referring to the importance of forgetting your cynicism and surrendering to the whimsy? If so, where do I sign?’

In his impressive five-star review, The Independent’s Geoffrey Macnab said: ‘In its own offbeat way, Asteroid City is an Anderson patchwork of Cold War paranoia and American family values in all their often hypocritical glory.

‘It is every bit as arch as his best work, while still managing to tug hard on the heartstrings.’

Deadline’s Todd McCarthy branded the film ‘fresh, original and disarming creation unlike anything else you might have seen’.

He said: ‘Scene after scene has a snap and urgency to it that matches the speed of the dialogue delivery and gives the film a sort of stylized urgency that is both distinctive and funny.

‘Sometimes it’s hard to keep up, and yet somehow it doesn’t matter at all, as one feels welcomed into a weird world.

‘On the other hand, the show-within-a-film conceit doesn’t really pay off; arguably, it complicates the work with little to show for it, and general audiences, as opposed to art film aficionados, will be baffled as to what’s going on.

‘There is even one more layer to the proceedings that, arguably, is more of a bother than a plus.

‘But otherwise, this is a fresh, original and disarming creation unlike anything else you might have seen with a degree of stylized storytelling that is notable and often exciting.’