Today we get to chat with Christine Andersen, author of The Cannes Film Festival from Rosa Romance Publishing Company.

Hi Ms. Andersen, thank you so much for taking time to be with us here at Fallen Angel Reviews. Please tell our readers a bit about yourself and your writing.

Hi Donna! Thanks for having me ... but please call me CAnde ... Ms. Andersen seems so formal. Okay ... your readers want to know about me? Type A personality. My work is my life. When it gets to be too much I hide in books.

I read where you’ve been to The Cannes Film Festival nine times. What was that like?

Total insanity. I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong. But it is just like the chapter in the book I wrote with the same name -- The Cannes Film Festival -- what I wrote is not an exaggeration at all. Cannes during the Film Festival is 24 hour whirling motor drives, paparazzi chasing naked starlets down the beach, stars trying to avoid the cameras, producers trying to make deals on street corners as though we were drug dealers and not Hollywood power brokers. Great food but no way to get a reservation anywhere. Mostly bad movies screening 24/7 with promotion for sales of films to all the foreign markets going on constantly. A major movie zoo on a beach in the south of France, basically.

Did you go as a producer or as a film writer?

As either a producer or as a Film Company Exec, depending on the year. The Cannes Film Festival isn't for writers ... it's a venue for selling your usually finished film to foreign buyers for distribution, and for selling off foreign territories to get the advanced funding or to get a commitment so you can get the funding to make your film.

What was it about writing a book that made you want to be published?

Ah ... I can't imagine taking all the time out that it takes to write a book without getting it published. I am not someone who has time to write just for the love of it ... or maybe it's that Type A person talking here ... if it's not done as work, I don't value it in my life? It's like writing spec scripts. If I can't get them shot, what's the point?

How hard was it to write the sex scenes in The Cannes Film Festival?

Not difficult at all ... sex comes out of the characters and so the scenes with each individual have a style and a flow and the terminology that fits the people involved in each sex scene. Some are more loving, some are more graphic ... depends on the characters and the motivation with which they have the sex.

Are any of your characters based on real people, or are they just from your imagination?

Mostly imagination ... although the circumstances that Cheeky goes through in the book are tricks and stunts that I have personal experience with as a producer. Filmmaking is always colorful. The stakes are so high that people don't always act honestly but they always convince themselves that they do as bad guys never believe they are bad -- they have to justify their own actions to themselves and to others. Everyone thinks they are acting for the best ... that's life.

What does your family and friends think of you being a published author?

No one really cares. They only want to know about the films. In Hollywood the writer is at the bottom of the food chain. I'm afraid most people in Tinsel Town forget that if it wasn't for writers they would have no jobs!

If there was one thing you could do over again in your writing career, what would it be and why?

Well ... The Cannes Film Festival is an excerpt (tweaked to stand on its own) of a 650-ish page book that I wrote in the mid-80s. I had a deal with a major publisher at that time but was too involved running a film company to do the polish they wanted and we parted ways on good terms. I wish I had taken the hours out of my somewhat overworked life to follow through and get it published in hardback and then I could have made a mini-series out of it as, in those days, TV included that genre. But for business and personal reasons I made the decision to set the book aside. Funny decision in retrospect ... as I really am a book person and love them much more than films.

Can you tell us about your works in progress?

Some century I need to finish the whole book and Rosa Romance will bring that out. But unless The Cannes Film Festival and the parent book sells enough to allow me to not do my day job, that's it at this time. I have too many film projects in various stages of development to write anything from scratch. And also, being Type A ... I have just got to finish what I started! It's a really good book and it shouldn't be sitting on a shelf. Major career mistake was not publishing it the first time ... isn't hindsight wonderful? I might have turned myself into Judy Krantz or Jackie Collins if I had followed through. I would have liked that as I enjoy the writing. I have more control writing than I ever could with films which are a collaborative effort by their very nature. Oh well. Does anyone's life turn out the way they wanted?

What is it about the medieval period that attracts you?

Boy, you really did read my web site, didn't you? I'm impressed! Good question too. :-) Sorry I don't have a good answer for you. I don't really know. I just love Roberta Gellis' work which is traditional historical and other writers like Katherine Kurtz with her Camber Trilogy and the other books in that series which even though it's an alternate reality is based on our medieval period. One of the things I love about good books is getting lost in the author's world and there's something about authors who can write fictional stories set against a tapestry of real reality or an alternate reality ... as long as it's three-dimensional which is something that history brings to their books. The medieval thing might be because of Gellis' Roselynde series. It's so alive. I have been searching for other good stuff in that period but haven't found much. If anyone knows of books I should read, please let me know!

What would you like readers to take away from The Cannes Film Festival?

How much of Hollywood is the manipulations needed to get your film made and how hard it is -- so that people quit complaining that they could do it better when they're watching the film I spent 10 years of my life bleeding to get made on their TV with a Budweiser in their hand. There's a reason we're all insane in LA ... this business is TOUGH. You have to live for it. Die for it. And have no life in between if you want to put your dreams up on that screen at 24 frames per second ... or the digital equivalent. Cheeky, the strong woman producer at the center of The Cannes Film Festival, is a true-to-life, hard-nosed producer who is determined to get her film made -- and made as good as she can -- no matter what she has to do to get that accomplished. I like Cheeky. I've got her balls but I wished I looked like her. Ha ha. If I was casting her? Keira Knightley

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If you could be anyone or anything for 48 hours, who or what would you be and why?

The ocean gently rolling up onto a sunny beach with no one on it. Why? Peaceful and rhythmic. Another very interesting question, BTW!

What makes a book a page turner for you? Makes you cry? Laugh?

Good writing. I have spent my whole life working with some of the best writers in the business. I am very trained to see what they have put on the page ... if I weren't I couldn't do what I do for a living. So for me a book must come alive on the film screen in the front of my mind. If the characters are true to themselves, if they act out of their own personalities, if the writer has a good knowledge of the back story and can turn a phrase to put the feeling, the smell, the physical sensation of the moment into my mind, then I am taken on a trip to that magical place the author wrote and I can forget my troubles for a time. That's why I love books. Rewrite -- that's why I love GOOD books.

Now a question just for fun , if you were a food, what would you be and why?

Chocolate ice cream. Why? Because it's the best!

How did you come up with the nickname CAnde?

I didn't. Blame it on my kid sister. When we were little she couldn't say Christine. She kept trying to say Tina, which is a great name, but she couldn't manage it so she said Tata. Tata Andersen ... sounded like it should have been our grandma's name or something. I hated it and kept trying to get her to say Christine Andersen. One day she slurred the words and it came out Candy ... I thought ... hummm ... she can say Candy ... but I'm C Ande if you use my spelling. So I started to use CAnde ... just to be cute sorta. One of those "I'm gonna be original and spell my name my way at school to make everyone crazy" things. But it stuck and I like it. It's less formal than Christine although that is my legal name and not CAnde!

Where can readers find out more about you and your books?

Thanks for asking. I have a very beautiful, I think (thanks to Chris at Rosa Romance!), web site at ChristineAndersen.com and there's more going on at the publishers ... rosaromance.com ... where they run contests and have a Yahoo Group and all that stuff I don't have time for. The gang at Rosa Romance have really been wonderful to me. I can't promise them I can do anything at any time they really need because of my day job and yet they deal with that because they like my writing. That's pretty terrific! I think most publishers would have told me to go jump off a bridge somewhere and yet they really love The Cannes Film Festival. I do need to get the parent book done for them but it's so loooooooooog. And it's all needed ... so it's not like I can cut out a few hundred pages and throw them away. :-) I hope Rosa Romance is wildly successful. They are sure working hard and they sure love writing! And they sure know how to treat authors terrifically! A great bunch of gals.

Ms. Andersen thank you again for taking the time to be with us today we know how busy you are. I look forward to reading more books from you.

And thank you for taking the time to do your research and ask intelligent questions. This is the first interview I've had time to do for the book and I am glad it was with you Donna. Good luck at FAR. That's a terrific review site!

Interviewed by: Donna