During her visit to the Cannes Film Festival, Meryl Streep sat down with French journalist Didier Allouch for a lenghty conversation panel titled “Rendez-Vous avec Meryl Streep”. They talked about receiving Cannes’ life achievement award (“I felt just a wave of feeling coming from the audience and it’s so much bigger than I thought”), her first visit to Cannes in 1989, french films and her early films. In the often funny interview, Allouch pointed out that in her first two films, “The Deer Hunter” and “Kramer vs. Kramer”, she appeared for only a couple minutes in the beginning and the end, yet she is the center and trajectory of both films, because the men think about her character all the time. “Those were the days when there was only one woman in the movie, so we remember her,” Streep replied. “And we remember her hair”.

On her first visit to the festival: I don’t have a bodyguard. They said, ‘you will need nine bodyguards’. I needed maybe a dozen the first time I came here, because in the olden days there wasn’t the same security, the barriers weren’t there and people would just come and the cameras were shoved up like this. It was insane and I almost didn’t recover from that, I went to the hotel room and couldn’t believe how wild it was. So that was 35 years ago, it’s changed a lot, the world has changed a lot, so that’s that’s what I remember about it.

On “Kramer vs. Kramer”: It was based on a novel by Avery Corman and it was sort of a revenge novel. I think he wrote it out of real anger. It was the beginnings of the women’s movement that didn’t make everyone happy, so there was a lot of vitriol about these women stepping out of the role that is prescribed and and leaving this poor man to raise his child and in the novel it’s quite opaque why she leaves. I’m not saying anything I hadn’t said to him – I don’t think he was interested in why she left. He was really interested in the father’s dilemma – how could he possibly raise this boy and keep his job and he barely knew how how to be with a 4-year-old so that was interesting. So, in the film, when Robert Benton took it and worked on the screenplay, he said ‘why did she go?’ and Dustin said, ‘I know’, and I said, ‘oh, tell me why?’ And so we all had this big discussion about why and [Benton] said, ‘well, I need this speech for the courtroom. I need her to because it’s such a mystery’, so we all went into our dressing rooms and Dustin wrote his version of my speech, and Benton wrote his version and I wrote mine and then we voted. And I won.

On singing in drama school: I love to sing and when I was a kid, I took opera lessons. I had a coloratura voice and then I started in high school cheerleading and smoking – those two things it kind of ruined it. But I didn’t really like opera anyway, I liked rock ‘n’ roll and Joni Mitchell and things like that. But I love music and I think singing is a direct line to your heart. In drama school, one of the greatest teachers I had was the singing teacher. She addressed twelve of us in our class, she said ‘all of you will get up and sing in front of the class, you’ll sing something that means something to you and you will make us cry’. And the the boys said, ‘yeah, but they’ll cry, they’ll die laughing’, and she said ‘no, no, you’re going to do it. When you sing, you open something, it’s a direct line. Your head isn’t involved, it’s just the melody, and she was right. She got every one of those guys up and sang something. One sang ‘Oh ,my mama, to me you are so beautiful’ it was fantastic it was a great great lesson – and I sang ‘It’s Lonely at the Top’ Randy Newman. I did… wow, that’s weird. I meant it ironically, you know, because I was broke.

On change in Hollywood for women: There is some progress, oh my God, there’s so many big female stars. The biggest stars in the world are women right now, although Tom Cruise is probably way over over the top. But you know it’s a lot different than when I started when I started. Movies are a projection of people’s dreams. Even executives have dreams. Executives, who are making a green light thing, they’re living their fantasy and so it’s very hard before there were women in green light positions, it was very hard for men to see themselves in a female protagonist. It was not difficult for the women executives to see themselves in a male protagonist, but the hardest thing – I’ve said this 150,000 times – is for a male to live through the female in a movie. The first movie I’ve ever made where a man came up to me afterwards and said ‘I know how you felt’ was “The Devil Wears Prada”. ‘I know what it’s like to be the one to take the decisions and nobody understands you you’. That was fascinating to me, but no man watches “The Deer Hunter” and feels like the girl. But I can watch “The Deer Hunter” and identify with John Savage’s, Chris Walken’s character, De Niro, it’s like we can do that, we speak that language, but it’s very hard for them to feel us.