Anti-hero Matt Damon brings roughneck America to Cannes

Matt Damon brought a slice of redneck middle America to Cannes on Friday with Stillwater, a film about a washed-up oil worker who seeks to save his daughter and their damaged relationship.

It has been a very French affair from the start: set in Marseille on France’s southern coast, made with a mostly French crew and French co-writers, and featuring local star Camille Cottin of Call My Agent fame.

Damon says he fell in love with Marseille during the filming: “I just think it’s a spectacular place,” he told reporters in Cannes. “If I was a young guy in France, this is the city I would live in. There’s so much culture and diversity.”

The process even turned the film’s American director and cast into fans of the local football team.

“Sometimes American film-makers come to Europe or into France to make a movie and they pitch their tent and keep the French film-makers on the outside,” Oscar-winning director Tom McCarthy said.

“But we said: ‘We can’t do that here’,” he said. “It really is a collaboration, a meeting of cinema cultures.”

Damon plays Bill Baker, an oil rig worker from Oklahoma who travels to Marseille to help his daughter who is in prison for a murder she says she didn’t...