Cannes Lions 2014 played host to star of stage and screen Ralph Fiennes (Schindler’s List, Harry Potter) yesterday for a session hosted by British newspaper The Guardian. Conversing with Fiennes in front of a packed audience of delegates and media was The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.
Fiennes said that he had agreed to the session out of admiration for The Guardian in breaking the story of NSA leak Edward Snowden in June last year. The issue was particularly relevant for Fiennes, as he himself is an advocate for privacy in an age when government surveillance and the ubiquitous nature of technology have made such a commodity precious indeed. Being a celebrity, Fiennes admitted the seeming conflict of interest his profession had with his advocacy, but he made it clear that his concerns were not for his privacy alone but for everyone’s.
An idea is the most explosive thing you can have,” said Fiennes. “If all our movements, conversations, emails, if everything can be taken from us and logged and profiled, that’s profoundly frightening,” said Fiennes. “It is Big Brother…every instinct in me finds that horrifying.”
While on the topic of personal freedoms, Fiennes recounted a recent trip to Russia where he had been asked to state in writing that he would not make a film about homosexual subject matter while in the country or work with a gay director.
“I knew there was a disturbing level of homophobia, but this written requirement I found profoundly disturbing,” shared Fiennes, referring to the situation in Russia as the media having had its spine essentially “broken” insofar as freedom of expression was concerned.
“In journalism, it’s about having the freedom to go where the stories take you,” said Rusbridger, referring both to press freedom and working in an age when much of media is either controlled or outright owned by conglomerates and corporate interests. “And there aren’t many places (in journalism) today that give you the freedom to write how you want and think what you want and investigate what you want…You have to take risks as a journalist and the tragedy that journalism has gotten into in the last ten years is that there are too many people who are ruled by the financial imperative, especially the people who imagine they can go on earning the quarter on quarter profits that they used to earn – If you start on that point, you just can’t do the kind of journalism that is going to be great and challenging.”
by Mikhail Lecaros
