Day 7: Behind the scenes at the Cannes Film Festival

Behind the scenes at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday: SQUARE-BASHER: John Boorman has been in a nostalgic mood this year with his film "Queen & Country" bringing memories of Britain in the 1950s flooding back. "Bleak" years they may have been but the antics of the autobiographical lead character Bill Rohan and his army chum Percy had the audience roaring with laughter. And despite the privations of the era, Boorman said he had enjoyed immersing himself in period details such as the strange clipped way people talked back then in the middle of the last century. The film must be one of the longest awaited sequels in history. Boorman's 1987 hit "Hope and Glory" tells the story of his earlier nine-year-old self thrilling to London's blitz while all the adults around him suffered. The follow-up takes in Boorman's compulsory spell in the army and everyone in the film is based on a real person such as Percy who copes with the boredom of endless square-bashing and boot polishing with various misguided projects. "In the film, Percy steals the regimental clock and the camp is turned upside down in an attempt to find it," Boorman recalled. "The real Percy caused even more havoc by stealing several valuable items at two-week intervals," he said. Committing his own life to film also left him struggling to distinguish between what was real and what was not. "David Hayman, who plays my father in both films, now seems more like my father than my father was, (and) Vanessa Kirby who plays my sister is so uncannily like her that I often felt in her scenes transported back to those days," he said. OSCAR TALK: The festival is only just over half way through and already critics and movie buffs are abuzz with Oscar talk. Funny man Steve Carell donned a prosthetic nose for his role as chemicals fortune heir John du Pont and his fatal obsession with two Olympic wrestlers played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in "Foxcatcher". His performance prompted Ramin Setoodeh of entertainment magazine Variety to declare: "Steve Carell is an Oscar lock." The Telegraph's Robbie Collin meanwhile tweeted: "Get ready for a world in which the phrase 'Academy Award nominee Channing Tatum' exists." BEST BASH PALME: If a Palme d'Or existed for the most stylish Cannes party venue it would surely go to LA-based actor and liquor heir Sid Mallya whose family owns the world's third largest spirits company. Guests to his castle on the Ile Sainte-Marguerite, just off the coast of Cannes, were allowed to roam as they wished around the three-and-a-half-acre private estate and Mallya made sure the drinks flowed, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The island, once owned by Louis XIV, is best known as the place where prisoner Eustache Dauger, aka the Man in the Iron Mask, was locked up in the seventeenth century.