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CANNES Kristen Scott Thomas and Uma Thurman celebratedOscar-winnerPhilippe Rousselotfor being awarded the first annual Pierre Angenieux Excellens in Cinematography Honor.

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Cannes Film Festival 2013

“Its not just me being honored, but all cinematographers,” Rousselottells The Hollywood Reporterat thebeachsidedinner ceremony. “Ill take it for everyone.”

The Oscar and Cesar-winner is known for his work onCharlie and the Chocolate Factory,Sherlock HolmesandLions for Lambs. He worked with Thurman onDangerousLiasons(1998) andHenry & June(1990), and with Scott Thomas onRandom Hearts(1999).

He won an Oscar for 1992′sA River Runs Through Itandwas also a member of the Cannes Film Festival jury in 1995.

CANNES: ‘The Missing Picture’ Wins Un Certain Regard Prize

When I heard about this I thought it was very, very important and wanted to come, Scott Thomas tellsTHR.You forget some cinematographers but some bring something intangible that opens you up and gives you confidence, a feeling that youre being helped as an actor, a feeling like theyre on your side. A really great [director of photography] is vital, and hes ofthose.

A cinematographer can be your greatest ally or your greatest enemy, she laughed.

The Pierre Angenieux is named after the founder of the famed lens company, and the prize will be handed out annually.

[Festival president] Gilles Jacob and [director] Thierry Fremaux have been very supportive, said Thales Angenieuxs CEO Pierre Anduranon the creation of the honor.Its important for film actors and directors to pay tribute to the technicians that are behind the camera.

A Houston screening of Kanye West‘s “New Slaves” video was shut down on Friday night, the Houston Chronicle reports.

West planned to project the music video for his new song around the world Friday night, including at three Houston locations. However, the showing at the Rothko Chapel was shut down before it even began.

VIDEO:Kanye West Plays New Songs on ‘SNL’, Album Title Teased

Houston police arrived on the scene and ordered the gathering crowd to disperse or be arrested for trespassing. The screening’s premature end apparently wasn’t because of an unruly crowd; according to the Chronicle, those gathered were excited, yet respectful.

The two other Houston screening locations had issues, too. Technical difficulties apparently hampered one location, while another was a no-show entirely, with fan Janet Quiroa revealing to the newspaper that the only entertainment was having sprinklers come on and “obnoxious people screaming Kanye threats.”

West debuted “New Slaves” last week in a similar fashion, with building projections around the world, including New York (a full map of screenings is located on West’s website). Houston’s projections were part of the second wave of screenings in preparation for West’s new album, Yeezus, which is set for a June 18 release.

Soaking up some sun on the first weekend of summer, Candice Swanepoel relaxed poolside on Saturday (May 25) in Miami.

Accompanied by her boyfriend Hermann Nicoli, the Victoria’s Secret Angel sipped on a cold drink as she took a dip in the refreshing water.

After some canoodling, the model, who wore a revealing black bikini, and her man gathered up their things and headed off for some alone time.

Meanwhile, the South African stunner recently revealed her go-to outfit to an Aussie newspaper saying, “My old faded black high-waisted jeans, a white T-shirt, booties and Céline bag. Extremely simple.”

As for how she keeps herself photo shoot ready, the 25-year old shared, “I use coconut oil as lotion and rosewater spray to keep my skin hydrated. On days off, I don’t use make-up.”

Enjoy the pictures of Candice Swanepoel hanging by the pool with her boyfriend in Miami, FL (May 25).

Bill Amberg, 52, opened his first leather studio in London in 1985, making bags, moulded body pieces and sculpture. With a flagship store in Mayfair and stocked at Harvey Nichols and Matches, Amberg is known for his collection of simple and refined bags. He also runs Bill Amberg Studio creating high-end leather interiors and products for private clients; the studio has collaborated with brands such as Aston Martin, Donna Karan and Alfred Dunhill. Amberg is married to Susie Forbes , principal at the Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design, and they have three children, Esme, 16, Daisy, 15, and Poppy, 12. They live in London and Somerset.

Routine
The alarm goes at 7.15am. I get up and do my exercises in the bathroom to get my blood moving. I made the exercise regime up – it is a little bit of yoga and a little bit of ‘waving my arms around’, as Susie calls it. I do that for 25 minutes, have a cup of tea and then I’m on my bicycle and off to the studio.

READ: Bill Amberg’s Little Black Book

Studio
We have craftspeople sitting alongside the designers at the studio, which I think is very effective. The workshop is in the core of the building and the designers work in the corners – that way the designers are constantly walking past people making things and they can develop ideas through the process of making.

Current projects
My business is split into two areas – the bag business and Bill Amberg Studio, which does leather products and leather interiors. Recently we did the packaging for two special editions of Suntory Whisky, and created all the in-room product – desktop stationary, magazine racks, do not disturb signs – for the Savoy, Dorchester and Bulgari hotels in London, plus the reception desk and all the handrails at the Shard; and we are finalising a line of furniture for Case Furniture, which will launch at the London Design Festival in September. We work with private clients a lot too, on interiors for their homes – cinemas, floors, home offices, and so on. In 2010 we collaborated on the interiors of Roman Abramovich’s yacht, the Eclipse.

Ukulele lessons
Every Monday I have a ukulele lesson at the Idler Academy on Westbourne Park Road, which is close to the studio. The Idler Academy is a bookseller and school – it sells a wonderful eclectic mixture of books and runs courses in philosophy, writing and poetry. I am taught ukulele by a guy called Danny Wootton. We sit upstairs playing ukulele while a philosophy lesson is going on downstairs. It is terribly middle class, but who cares. I play the ukulele [pictured] that my dad bought in Hawaii when he was in the Navy. I remember it as a child and found it in the attic a few years ago.

Starting out
I used to make my sister and my mum horrible leather things when I was about 10 years old. They were little things hole-punched and stitched with string, which were meant to be wallets and bags, but I don’t think anybody would ever have put anything in them. My mum and dad were great encouragers of making anything and Dad always had a workshop of some sort. He ran a company designing and making lifts in Northampton, and my mum was an architect. She would design things and he would build them – he made all the kitchen cupboards in our house and things like that.

READ: Inside Bill Amberg’s garden

Bike
A dear friend of mine called Chester built my current bike [pictured] from parts he found on the internet. I left the design to him, except for the handlebars and seat, which I’d bought already. I didn’t give Chester a budget, but he knows I am fundamentally mean – it cost a total of £400. All the designers at the studio ride bicycles and we use the same bike shop, Halfpipe on Golborne Road. A few years ago the guys at Halfpipe asked us to do some one-off saddles for their customers and gave us Charge Spoon saddles to strip off and redo in leather. I sent pictures to the people at Charge 18 months ago to show them what I had been doing to their saddles and they asked my studio to develop a new one. It is called the Pan and has just gone into production.

Shed
I built a shed at the bottom of our garden in London just before my 40th birthday. At that time I felt I had become separated from the process of actually making anything in leather. I had become a businessman rather than a designer and maker, so I built the shed and it was fantastic to personally re-engage with the material. I do a lot of making in there and repairing stuff.

The girls
A great friend and wonderful photographer called Jeremy Stigter has taken photographs of the girls over the years, and we have three on the wall in our kitchen from when they were little. These photos [pictured] capture their personalities. Even when I think of the girls now they still have the personalities the pictures show. I met Jeremy at a dinner when I first went to Paris in the late 1980s and after dinner we ended up driving around Paris in his Fiat 500, going to bars and clubs and having an extraordinary debauched night. We’ve been friends ever since.

Motorbike seat
I am currently building a motorbike and finished the seat [pictured] in bed the other night. It is an old 1940s Harley Davidson saddle that a friend gave to me ages ago and I cut it down to make it a bit smaller, took all the upholstery off, wet-moulded the leather and hand-stitched it all. I’ve had motorbikes since I moved to London in 1984, and particularly like old Nortons. In Somerset I have a few old trial bikes for riding off-road.

Quality
The real distinction of quality of leather is the amount of surface pigment, the amount of finish on the leather. In basic terms, if there is lots of pigment on top of the leather, it is to cover imperfections in the raw material. Warmth of touch is an indication that it hasn’t got too much pigment on it and good-quality leather also shouldn’t have too much uniformity of colour – variation in colour is an indicator that it is not overly top-dressed.

READ: Portrait of a driver: Bill Amberg

Records
I have a big collection of vinyl and record players set up in various places in my houses and one in my shed. I love listening to vinyl. Susie thinks it is because my attention span is only 20 minutes. Every time I go to a flea market I always have a shufti through the boxes of records, and when I am in Somerset I visit the record shop Raves from the Grave in Frome. One LP that means a lot to me is Live Stiffs [pictured]. I think you are forever influenced by your first taste of music and my first taste was of the punk and new wave scene at the end of the 1970s. During that period there was a tour arranged by Stiff Records featuring all my favourite bands – Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Nick Lowe and Larry Wallace. When I stick the album on, it reminds me of jumping up and down at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, pogoing in the mosh pit.

All photos: Thom Atkinson.

The American Idol season 13 judges panel is starting to come together.

A source close to the dealings tells The Hollywood Reporter that former finalist Jennifer Hudson is in negotiations to fill one of the three seats. Vulture had previously reported that she was in the running as part of an all-alumni panel, which would also include season one winner Kelly Clarkson and possibly Clay Aiken, runner-up on season two and Celebrity Apprentice star, or Adam Lambert, who came in second on season eight.

PHOTOS: ‘American Idol’ Season 12 Finale in Pictures

But a rep for Clarkson, whose wedding to Blake Shelton‘s manager, Brandon Blackstock, is coming up later this year, tells THR, “Kelly will not be a judge on Idol.” And sources close to Lambert say his representatives have yet to be contacted by Idol brass, either from the network side or the production side. (Idol is produced by FremantleMedia in partnership with 19 Entertainment/CORE Media Group and Fox.)

A rep for Hudson and Fox would not comment.

Idol had previously considered going down an alumni route, suggesting (after a ho-hum ninth season) an all-star rematch where winners and former finalists would return to battle for the crown again. It’s worth noting that the first ex-contestant to say no was their No. 1 choice: Jennifer Hudson, who famously came in seventh on season three, only to win an Oscar two years later. The idea was quickly nixed, according to a well-placed source.

The new judges are typically revealed in September when taped auditions begin. Although all four season 12 panelists — Keith Urban, Nicki Minaj, Randy Jackson and Mariah Carey — are not expected to return, the only judge to officially announce his departure has been Jackson.

Speaking to THR earlier on Friday, departing Fox reality chief Mike Darnell elaborated on the tricky task of finding the perfect singing show judge. “If you’ve never done it before, we don’t know what we’re getting,” he said. “You might be great, you might be terrible. It’s a skill. … Everybody thinks they can do it but not everybody can.”

Darnell would neither confirm nor deny Hudson’s involvement in the show next year.

Twitter: @Idol_Worship

Ali represents a fine addition to the roster of films that have come out of Seville in recent years, most recently with Albert Rodriguezs acclaimed Group 7. Less willfully quirky and raucous than many of its Seville-based predecessors, Ali is a low-key, light-of-touch and perceptive study of a teenage girls struggles to tackle her own securities that sometimes feels more inspired by movies than by direct observation, but which nonetheless locks the viewer in by virtue of its earthy performances and generosity of spirit. As a convincing visiting card from debut director Paco R. Banos, Ali has the punch to make its mark on the festival circuit.

Ali (Nadia de Santiago) works in a supermarket alongside on/off boyfriend Julio (Adrian Lama): the opening scene between them nicely shows that in the bedroom, tough-girl teen attitudes will not get you very far. Having watched with horror her neurotic mom Alicia (Veronica Forque) stumble from unhappy relationship to unhappy relationship, Ali has assumed the role of carer to her own mother. So shes angry to see Alicia take up with taxi driver Antonio (Luis Marco). But its clear that though shes a late teen rebel, smoking hard and selling cheap alcohol to the kids from the block, Alis disapproval of her mothers hunt for love is part-driven by her awareness of her own emotional inhibitions.

As the entirely unnecessary voiceoverat the start explains, Ali is afraid of two things: driving and falling in love. Somewhat schematically, but quite plausibly, the film charts her slow progress in both areas, progress mostly made by what she learns from her often stormy interactions with those around her.

The film thoughtlessly incorporates a few bad habits picked up from watching other movies, including a couple of too-predictable slow motion moments. Alienating urban settings are likewise drawn from a thousand US indies, shopping malls and hospital waiting rooms among them, though one overhead shot of the vast, empty space used for Sevilles annual city fair is particularly striking.

One scene, featuring Ali and cohorts metal detecting in an empty swimming pool, seems to be there only because of its quirkily comic appeal. But beneath all the the superficial derivativeness, theres a real generosity of spirit about the film, a desire to probe beneath its bright surfaces, that more than makes up for it.

Torres keeps up the pace, attentively preventing his character study from sliding into the soporifically self-regarding: thankfully, at no point do we have to wait while Ali stares thoughtfully into space, since its pretty clear that she doesnt have time for such navel-gazing. More familiar to Spanish viewers for her TV than for her film work, Nadia de Santiago manages to be both moody and winsome, doing good work as a young woman representing a generation of teens forced to grow up too soon, while Forque, whose work has often been annoyingly mannered, does full justice to the complexity of her relationship with her daughter.

The squint-inducing sunshine of the Spanish south dominates the films palettes, and seems to spill over into the vast, impersonal interiors of the supermarket, inventively filmed by Alvaro Gutierrez. The score by Julio de la Rosa, a stalwart of the Seville film scene, is attractive, off-kilter indie pop, and as such is right in line with the films overall mood.

Venue: Artistic Metropol, Madrid, May 20
Production companies: Letra M Producciones.
Cast: Nadia de Santiago, Veronica Forque, Adrian Lamana, Julian Villagran, Luis Marco.
Director: Paco R. Banos
Screenwriter: Rafael Cobos, Paco R. Banos
Producer: Alvaro Alonso
Director of photography: Alvaro Gutierrez
Production designer: Gigia Pellegrini
Music: Julio de la Rosa
Costume designer: Soledad Molina
Editor: Jose M. G. Moyano
Sales: Urban Films, Madrid
No rating, 86 minutes

After a hectic morning and a less than quiet arrival at LAX, Kim Kardashian grabbed some dinner with a friend on Friday evening (May 24) in Beverly Hills.

Dressing her baby bump in a black dress and a white cardigan, the mom-to-be hurried inside La Scala while not paying the prying paparazzi any attention.

Earlier in the day, the reality star lashed out at over eager shutterbugs who surrounded her vehicle as she tired to leave the airport after arriving from France.

Kim shouted to one photographer to “Shut the f*cking door, you idiot.” This is the third incident involving the preggers star or her partner Kanye West withing a couple of weeks.

Enjoy the pictures of Kim Kardashian out to dinner at La Scala in Beverly Hills, CA (May 24).

Peter Marino’s offices occupy the 35th and 36th floors of a building in a prime position in midtown Manhattan. There are huge, wraparound windows – Marino is a great believer in natural light, for everyone – and the view is spectacular, yet all I can look at are the walls. Marino wanted to be an artist before he opted for architecture, and he has collected art ever since.

In the reception area alone there’s an enormous and glorious Anselm Kiefer landscape, some classic 1960s Warhol screen-prints and two large canvases. There’s a Richard Deacon sculpture, a Han dynasty terracotta horse, a serene Bodhisattva statue, paintings by Cy Twombly and Richard Prince and a couple of fine pieces from Marino’s collection of European bronzes, the best of which were exhibited in London at the Wallace Collection in 2010. From my seat I can also see a couple of Damien Hirst spot paintings – one in black, made specially for Marino – and a large portrait of the architect in his signature biker leathers by Francesco Clemente.

In many offices this kind of show is limited to the lobby and the meeting rooms, to impress clients. But touring the office later I see that Marino shares his art collection as liberally as he shares the natural daylight. World-class art is everywhere – on the walls, the floors, even on desks – along with samples of fabrics, marbles, elaborate fibreglass and metal wall finishes and carpet. (In a Marino building everything is custom-made. His clients can always feel totally confident that no one else has the same.)

WATCH: Keira Knightley as Coco Chanel in ‘Once Upon a Time’

After Marino has ushered me into his modest office, I tell him how much I love the Kiefer painting, and he immediately bustles off to find pictures of the ski lodge he’s designed for himself in the upmarket resort of Aspen, Colorado. It’s beautiful, with a semicircular glass wall facing the mountains, but the view takes second place to his art, with 12 more Kiefer paintings hanging on the walls opposite.

I confess that until I met Marino I had thought of him more as an interior designer, a man who had built his reputation on fitting out opulent flagship stores for the luxury labels. But this grew out of his practice building bespoke houses for the mega-rich, including many of the heads of those labels. Some current projects line the walls of his office, and they are spectacular. There’s a house in Lebanon, its outer shell based on interesting cube shapes; another, more organic home for a Brazilian family, clad in distinctive shades of white, grey and charcoal wood; a house in the Hamptons with a curved upper floor facing the sea that looks like a bigger, whiter version of Future Systems’ iconic media centre at Lord’s cricket ground.

He can’t name the clients – except to say that one is the head of a prominent private bank – and it is doubtful that pictures of the finished buildings will ever be seen in public. ‘Boutiques are only 40 per cent of our business,’ he says. ‘We’re a company of 180 people, and mostly what we do are new buildings. We’ve over 100 architects, 40 decorators and everybody else in between. The boutiques get huge publicity, but the houses are for super-wealthy people, and they don’t want to talk about it. So most of our best work is never published.’

There is no real signature look. Every house is completely different, tailored to the needs of the client and the site, and each shop is carefully designed to reflect the brand’s DNA. But all of his work has a few basic, underlying principles.

‘Quality, functionality, a gorgeous sense of light, and what I call a mixed rich cultural baggage. I entered architecture after years of painting and sculpture and art history, so I didn’t come at it from an engineering point of view. I was very lucky to make it through the educational system and become a licensed architect, because the system is skewed to eliminate people like me.’

READ: Inside the Peter Marino-designed Louis Vuitton store

I joke that I would like him to build something for me, throwing in a couple of artworks as a house-warming gift, and I wonder what he could do with a budget of, say, £200,000. He laughs, and says he recently had a letter from a girl he used to date in high school, asking if he could design her a two-room house on a tiny plot of land she had inherited. ‘It’s not that I couldn’t do it,’ he says. ‘It’s just that it would probably cost me a million dollars. When you become large, it’s very cost-prohibitive to do small projects. It’s just economics: you need three to five architects, their salary is what, $800,000-900,000, I’ve got to rent the desks, so it goes up from there.’

Peter Marino at the 2013 shows in Paris in March. Photo: Getty

A small project for him now would be well over the £3 million mark, he adds, but many go up to several hundred million. His art collection is only one sign of this success. As well as the ski lodge he has a house in the Hamptons, and a home close to the Manhattan office. The proportions of the New York apartment can perhaps be guessed by the fact that there’s a stage in the main living space where, each year, to celebrate their anniversary, he and his wife, the costume designer Jane Trapnell, put on an opera.

This November it is their 30th anniversary, and they are staging Gluck’s Orpheo ed Euridice . Marino has designed the sets (black leather to represent Hades; a silver curtain blasted with light to suggest heaven); Trapnell has created the costumes (swathes of silk taffeta in pink and blue); and they are flying in singers including Silvia Tro Santafe to entertain 150 or so close friends. Marino knows the value of this kind of theatre. He is a big bear of a man with an infectious, life-affirming laugh who can also tip quite easily into tears when he gets emotional, which is often. Since the 1980s, when he rediscovered a love of motorbikes, he has dressed head-to-toe in black leather and currently sports a Mohican-style haircut; not what you expect from a 62-year-old who regularly features in lists of the world’s most influential architects, which of course is the point.

But for all that, he is remarkably down-to-earth, and also surprisingly sweet and vulnerable. Maybe it’s the mood he’s in, or maybe his foibles have been exaggerated elsewhere, but when we meet, he doesn’t refer to himself in the third person and only once, when he’s showing me the computer renderings of the new Chanel flagship he’s finishing in London, does he indulge in a little hype. ‘I made this as hot as I can,’ he says, grinning. ‘If it gets any hotter we’re gonna need asbestos suits!’

Press profiles often mention his peculiar, bandy-legged walk – assuming it is caused by his tight leathers – and his accent, which hovers between Paris, London and his native New York and sometimes has a slight lisp or stammer that can make his speech sound affected. But both are the result of a rare bone marrow disease that devastated his childhood. He talks about this only reluctantly. ‘Your bones can’t support themselves, so you can’t walk,’ he says when I push. ‘It was the early days of bone-marrow transplants, which were really painful and horrible.’ He didn’t walk until he was seven. Once he was mobile he needed a speech therapist because he had spent so much time isolated in hospital beds that he didn’t talk well.

READ: Chanel autumn/winter 2013 show report

It is typical of Marino that he manages to find the positive in all of this, saying it honed his powers of observation and imagination. ‘If you’re four, five years old and stuck in a hospital room where they’ve just put you in a full-body cast because you’ve had bone marrow transplants, and you’re left staring at the light fixture on the ceiling, you either get creative fast, or you die. You take that inanimate object and you make a whole world around it, or you lose your mind. It was a trade-off in life, I always felt. I got a bad shuffle of the deck at the beginning, but a great one at the end!

‘I work 12 hours a day, seven days a week – and I love it. I’m creative, I feel fulfilled. I’m from a solidly lower-middle-class background, I’m not from the world that I’m in now. So I appreciate it a lot. I’ve really got a rich, full life.’

Family is important to him. He talks lovingly about his parents – from Sicily on his father’s side, and from Ukraine via France on his mother’s – and when his wife pops by at the start of the interview, he immediately goes out to talk to her. Photographs of their daughter, Isabelle (taken by the fashion photographer Steven Meisel, of course), hang prominently on his office wall. She is now studying forensic anthropology at NYU, he says proudly, before showing me the photograph on his desk of him and his wife outside a Dior show. She looks like a chic Parisienne, he like a 1980s leather queen. ‘The only thing we share is that we’re both wearing sunglasses. It’s hilarious!’

From left: Peter Marino with his wife, Jane Trapnell, Arielle Dombasle and Jack Lang at the Chanel Haute Couture autumn/winter 2011/12 show in Paris. Photo: Getty

I say I had assumed he was gay and he laughs, saying he and Jane are the ultimate proof that opposites attract. She is a Daughter of the Revolution, a descendant of the original US settlers, her blood as blue as it is possible to be in a country without an aristocracy. ‘She wears couture and little pearls, and is in all these exclusive clubs I’m not allowed into.’

They both worked for a while at IM Pei’s New York office: he as a young architect, she as a translator (she lived in Paris for a few years, and is fluent in French). At the time he was living with the art dealer Constance Kamens, and Trapnell was also seeing someone, but three years later they were both single and he asked her out. ‘She was the right one for me,’ he says, laughing. ‘Boy, I don’t know who else could have stuck it out.’

His rise to the top was not an easy one. After training on a full scholarship at Cornell University, he did 12 years working for prestigious firms before setting out on his own, working from his small flat and, when he could afford an employee, setting up a second drawing board over the bathtub. ‘If you’d called up and said, “I need my lavatory fixed,” I’d be there! I was desperate to make it work.’ Slowly, he started creating homes for families with names such as Rothschild or Agnelli (the owners of the Fiat empire), and then in 1985 he was asked to do a radical refit for the New York department store Barneys, creating individual boutiques inside for different designers, which put him in contact with some of fashion’s top names.

Shops were not prestige work for an architect at that time, but what Marino did was reinvent not just Barneys but the whole way upmarket fashion stores began to look at retail. He ended up doing 17 Barneys stores before they went bankrupt in 1996, when the first recession bit and he ended up laying off half his staff. But slowly the designers started coming to him with shops: Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, then the European labels, Armani, Chanel, Vuitton, Fendi, Zegna, Loewe.

Marino’s genius is to give each its own clear identity, creating stores that are cool and contemporary but also subtly envelop you in the brand’s heritage. So the colours in the Chanel store, which will open next month, will match its iconic perfume packaging: black, white, beige and gold in everything from the hand-sewn curtains to the specially commissioned artworks. Coco Chanel often wore black ribbons, so the wall in the long gallery where handbags will be displayed is covered with thick silk satin ribbons, woven like a screen with cut-outs to display bags.

He is unique in working regularly for competing fashion houses. In New Bond Street alone, he has the spectacular Vuitton maison, the new Chanel, a small shop for the Swiss watch company Hublot, a big store for Zegna on its way, and he’s just taking meetings about a new Dior flagship.

READ: Chanel is Pinterest’s most popular fashion brand

Then there’s the facelift he is giving Sotheby’s, starting with the boardrooms. He has drafted in Damien Hirst, and they have worked together to create a square panelling for the walls in pastel colours, some of which are covered with new butterfly works by Hirst. The pictures Marino showed me look gorgeous, giving a fresh, contemporary feel that still has all the gravitas the auction house would need for its private rooms.

Marino is due to create 61 high-end flagship stores this year, and though he still calls them boutiques, the scale of these buildings is something he could never have imagined early on. ‘In 1991 if someone came in with a $1 million budget for a boutique I would have fainted. Nobody spent even half that. But now, the bar has risen very high.’

As the brands have grown and expanded across the globe, the stores have become bigger and more opulent in their finishes. Dealing with the owners Marino had an advantage over other architects, because already he had their trust: he had designed many of their homes. Gradually they began asking him to create shops that were more like these homes, places where their super-rich customers could feel comfortable, but also communicating a lifestyle the rest of us buy into when we save up for a bag, or indulge in a perfume. ‘It’s aspirational. If a customer comes in and just buys a $40 lipstick, it doesn’t matter. Her impression of Chanel is what’s important.’

To do this Marino asked for large budgets to custom-make everything from the furniture and upholstery to the art, persuading the clients to fund this from their huge advertising budgets. The flagships are now seen as a way of proclaiming the brand’s values rather than as buildings that need to pay their way. Marino thought it had all reached its peak with the luxurious maison he created for Chanel on avenue Montaigne in Paris two years ago, but then the company acquired a new, three-storey building on Bond Street, and asked him to do it all again – only better.

WATCH: A brief history of Chanel’s iconic bouclé jacket

It was hard, he pointed out, to push the architecture and interior design any further without tumbling over into tacky, so instead he asked for 10 times the budget on art. In homage to the brand’s iconic fragrance, Chanel No5, he has always commissioned five new artworks for each Chanel store. For the London showcase there will be 20 new pieces, all in the Chanel colours or featuring its camellia motif. The result looks sumptuous, with one of Marino’s own solid bronze cabinets mixing with a new sculpture by the 1987 Turner Prize winner Richard Deacon, Karl Lagerfeld prints and work by a younger British artist, Idris Khan.

Marino commissioned the French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel to make a show-stopping 11m hanging sculpture in white, black and grey glass beads, and then designed the shop’s staircase around it. ‘You can’t buy a sculpture to fill a stairwell afterwards, that doesn’t work.’ Then, as a focal point for the top of the stairs, he ordered a portrait of Coco Chanel from the young Iranian painter YZ Kami. ‘I really love the artists’ input. They give so much originality, and I’m the first one to go, “Oh dude, I would so never have thought of that!”‘

The art should appreciate in value and justify some of his fees, which is just as well, because it’s likely that within a decade, all of this will be replaced by something new. This is why he has chosen to make his big bronze pieces, he says, because they are something that will outlast him. For the rest, he has learnt to be philosophical.

‘Architects have big egos. We like to think we’re creating the pyramids and they’re going to be around for thousands of years. And it’s a joke, because they’re not even going to last our lifetime. I built a home for umpteen gazillion dollars on a gorgeous piece of property in Palm Beach, and 11 years later somebody else bought it and knocked it down.’ It feels awful, he says, but then chuckles. ‘But of course, I can’t be too sad, because it gives me the chance to do the work again!’

AmfARs annual Cannes fundraiser, Cinema Against AIDS, has auctioned off some crazy stuff over the years, but the events latest edition went way beyond.

Just before we sat down for the benefit dinner last night, the galas co-host Harvey Weinstein told me about an unusual auction item on the block. At first, I thought Id heard him say, Im going to sit on Leos face. What? (And, ew.) He repeated: Im going to send Leonardo DiCaprio into space. He added, A lot of people in Hollywood would
like me to go into space, but only on a one-way ticket.

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Turns out they were selling a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight with DiCaprio. One of the celeb auctioneers, Jeremy Renner, later talked up the unique zero-gravity experience by noting that the winning bidder would get to puke on Leo. They ended up selling three seats for a total of nearly $4 million.

AmfARs Cannes gala has come a long way from the days when, as orgs Global Fundraising Chairman Sharon Stone remembered, I stood on a chair and auctioned off a look at Naomi Campbells navel ring. Weinstein said, When we started, it was Kenneth Cole, Elizabeth Taylor, me, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell and Paul Sorvino at the Moulin de Mougins. We didnt even know how to get an auction going. We auctioned off Paul Sorvino singing songs and Johnny did magic tricks, I think, Naomi took her clothes off in a room and somebody could watch… We raised 300 grand.

Yesterday, AmfAR hauled in a record $25 million in a tent pitched by the tennis courts of the Du Cap property. In attendance were most of the Cannes festivals remaining VIPs, including DiCaprio, Jessica Chastain and Cannes jurors Nicole Kidman and Chistoph Waltz. But the majority of the auction items went to folks who werent
necessarily in town for the Cannes film festival or market. An Andy Warhol print of Elizabeth Taylor went for 600,000 euros ($776,000) to Tamara Ecclestone, whose father is Formula 1 racing boss Bernie Ecclestone. (The nearby Monaco Grand Prix happens this weekend.) Sheikh Abdulla bin Isa Al Khalifa, who presides over the Bahrain Grand Prix (who sat at a table hosted by Bold Films Gary Michael Walters), said hed meant to bid on the Damien Hirst piece that ended up selling for 800,000 euros ($1.03 million).

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Stone gathered more than 20 benefactors for a pediatric AIDS fund, by luring them with signed Robert Rauschenberg prints. She also auctioned off a group of ensembles from the worlds top fashion designers. The so-called Ultimate Gold Collection was curated by former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld and paraded onto the stage by well-known
runway models. With her signature sass, Stone teased, a lucky bidder could become the new owner of all of these gowns and all of these suits and not one of these models. The lot went for more than 1 million euros ($1.29 million).

The dinner ended on high note with four songs by Duran Duran, who made their AmfAR debut. At the after party, the bands Nick Rhodes shared This cause is very dear to a lot of the people in the entertainment industry. I lost at least a half a dozen friends to AIDS right at the beginning in the 1980s.

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VIPs were ushered into the top room of the Eden Roc restaurant for the after-dinner celebration. The gale-force winds had picked up again, making the poolside area almost unusable. Jessica Chastain, a first-time AmfAR presenter, stood in the hallway wearing her boyfriends jacket. She was thrilled the benefit made such a huge jump over last years nearly $11 million raised.

I was hoping wed double it, and we made even more!

DiCaprio and his mother sat in the far back corner, surrounded by hopeful-looking ballgown-clad girls who were perhaps looking for an intergalactic plus-one invite.

For Weinstein, the AmfAR bash was a great way to wind down the film festival. After two weeks in Cannes and enjoying the French Riviera, this is a way of giving back, he said.