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Liam Gallagher: The Movie Mogul



Liam Gallagher jets into Cannes in his new guise as a movie mogul. He's got the smoky shades and the Superfly gait. His leather coat is buttoned to the throat and he lopes across the beachfront terrace wearing a pair of fluffy, leopard-print loafers he might have plucked from a pensioner's feet. The press aren't sure what to make of him. "He's become a caricature," one whispers to me. "He should be in a Mike Leigh film."

It's unlikely Gallagher will act in a Mike Leigh film – he says his favourite recent movie is Avatar. Instead, the Oasis frontman has teamed up with Revolution Films to adapt The Longest Cocktail Party, the 1972 memoir by Richard Di Lello, an American teen who became the "house hippie" at Apple records; the story views the Beatles' break-up from the wings. "The Beatles aren't going to be in this film," cautions Gallagher. "There's gonna be no one auditioning for John, Paul, George and Ringo. And there'll be no wigs." I see a foreign journalist duly note this down: no wigs.

Apple, explains producer Andrew Eaton, was ahead of its time: a multimedia enterprise that branched into film, fashion and retail, before collapsing at the start of the 1970s. "But I like that," Gallagher says. "I like the failure, the sadness of something being so great. It's life – shit happens. You've got to pick the good bits and mix them with the sad bits, or the horrendous bits."

This project, he adds, is a one-off. The film business is just like the music business, full of people talking bullshit: he can't be taking it from two sides at once. "I'm doing this one thing and then that's it, I'm back on the dole. I'm not gonna be doing films about whales or unkempt eyebrows."

The reporter drags me aside. "Did he say whales or Wales?" he asks, notebook at the ready. It could conceivably be either. The singer has gone and he leaves us with a mystery. Whales or Wales? We stare blankly out to sea, pondering the profound implications of the film Liam Gallagher will never make.

Click here to watch another short interview with Liam.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

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