A wise man once told me that however original and unique you may think your great new idea is, you'd better act on it quickly, because somewhere in the world someone else is having the exact same idea at the exact same time.
In the case of director Pablo Berger, this meant he was seven years into his Quixotic attempt to make a black-and-white, silent-movie version of "Snow White" set in 1920s Spain when the phone rang. It was a friend calling from the Cannes Film Festival, asking, "Have you heard about this film called 'The Artist'?"
Berger, an expat Spanish filmmaker now based in New York with his Japanese wife, threw his phone into the wall. "It was pretty frustrating," the director tells The Japan Times. "Especially because when 'The Artist' was released, I had already shot 'Blancanieves'; it was already in the can."