Cast member of Palme d’Or contender shot in Kent says the high number of chaperones and intimacy coordinators on set was over the top

Is Britain leading the way in protecting young people and children from the potential traumas of working on a film set, or has it all gone far too far? Two of the most prominent European stars attending the Cannes film festival, both with high-profile premieres, have very different views.

Franz Rogowski, the acclaimed German actor who plays a key role in Bird, British director Andrea Arnold’s contender for the top Palme d’Or prize, said this weekend that the proliferation of chaperones and intimacy coordinators that had been required on the shoot on location in Kent qualified as well-intended “madness”.

The maverick director and his trusted cast on making Kinds of Kindness, the ‘bonkers’ film causing a stir on the Croisette

Joe Alwyn, the British star of one of the most disturbing films to compete at the Cannes festival this year, has given his verdict on making the “bonkers” Kinds of Kindness, which features scenes of group sex, cannibalism and violence and in which Alwyn has to perform a drug rape on the character played by Oscar-winner Emma Stone. “You have to try not to unpack it all too much, or you get it stuck in your head,” he said on Saturday.

The 33-year-old, until now best known as a former partner of Taylor Swift, has been thrust into the glaring lights of Cannes this weekend, but has also had to survive entering the odd imagination of Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos. Alwyn said the best way to prepare himself for Lanthimos’s unsettling and explicit screen world had been to “trust him, trust him, trust him”. “It is bizarre and strange and bonkers and special,” Alwyn added, “but one of the reasons I love his films is because you feel it first, before you try to understand it all.”