“It’s always more elegant for a brand to dress Brad Pitt,” says Artus, guest on the France Inter show on Saturday May 11. While he announced that the actors with mental disabilities from his successful film Un p’tit truc plus will take the steps of the Cannes Film Festival on May 22, the director and actor regretted that no luxury brand had given them borrowed outfit.

“On the 22nd, we go up the steps,” declared the 36-year-old director and actor, three days before the opening Tuesday of the most prestigious film festival in the world. While the film released on May 1 exceeded 1.6 million admissions on Friday, its fifteen main actors will meet on the steps of the Palais des Festivals, according to Artus.

“There are eleven actors with disabilities and four classics, four boring ones we will say,” he laughed, specifying that the latter were himself, Clovis Cornillac, Alice Belaïdi and Céline Groussard. According to him, and contrary to custom, no luxury brand lent evening wear to the team for this climb of the steps.

“I do not understand why. They tell us stories about quotas, saying “We have already lent all our costumes”,” he declared. He assured that he did not believe this explanation before adding: “It doesn’t matter, it’s our film costume designers who will make them very beautiful costumes (…) and it will be very good”, he said.

Climbing the steps with the film crew, “that was close to my heart for a long time”, while “there are influencers who have climbed them ten times”, also admitted the director. “Now that the film has this success, I find that it is even more legitimate,” he added, saying he was “happy” that his actors with disabilities “are getting a bit of a spotlight at Cannes” .

Furthermore, Artus, originally from Montpellier, will be one of the bearers of the Olympic flame on Monday in this city, alongside one of his actors, Sofian, he said. A comedy that aims to laugh with disabled people and not at their expense, Un p’tit truc en plus is already one of the successes of the year.

Father and son on screen, Clovis Cornillac and Artus play two little thugs who hide in the middle of a summer camp for young people with mental disabilities, in order to escape the police. Artus poses as a boarder and Clovis Cornillac as his educator.

Asked about the reasons for the success, Artus felt that “in this somewhat anxiety-provoking era, it’s a film that feels good”, and which allows us to discover “a population that we don’t often see, people in situations of mental disability.