Once upon a time, or so the Cannes legend goes, a well-known German director burst into his Israeli producer’s office on the Croisette, levelled a shotgun at his head, and threatened to pull the trigger unless he was paid for his work on a recently completed film. The producer, courteous and unflappable, pulled a pen from his top pocket and, with a flourish, wrote out a cheque for the outstanding amount The director meekly said thank you and went home happy The cheque (inevitably) bounced. He continues: “If you’re serious and professional, and you both know what you’re doing, you don’t need 70 lawyers to draw up a contract … “Jean-Luc is the kind of a guy who shakes your hand and then goes straight into production,” says Golan with obvious admiration for the French director’s brisk, business-like approach. For me, the idea of any Godard movie was attractive.”The contract was promptly signed then and there .. on the back of a napkin.

A case in point, and one which brings us to the most famous Golan anecdote of all, is Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 effort, King Lear, starring Burgess Meredith (Penguin in the 1960s Batman TV series) as the ornery old king and bratpacker Molly Ringwald as his daughter. “Ah,” he smiles, “the napkin story.”Godard (whose new TV documentaries on L’Histoire du Cinema screened in Cannes earlier in the week) has made some of the most provocative, brilliant movies in film history, but he has spelt commercial death at the box-office since around 1968, when he fell under the deadening spell of Brecht, Mao and radical student politics. Nevertheless, when Godard appeared at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes demanding to see Golan, the producer hurried down to meet him in the bar. “He told me the story of King Lear – the way he wanted to do it. When he and Globus were at their peak, Cannon was one of the largest film companies in Europe. Film-makers from all over the world, red-blooded action directors and European auteurs alike, beat a track to their doors.Out of a strange perversity, this most commercially-minded of producers sometimes backed films so obscure and so difficult that one doubts even their directors’ mothers went to see them. One night, exactly a week later, he was warned by a security guard that there was a man with a chainsaw waiting for him on the street.

“And that’s how we came to make Barfly together,” he chuckles, remembering the meandering Charles Bukowski-scripted yarn about a pair of old soaks (Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway) in downtown LA which Schroeder directed for him in 1987.By Golan’s standards, this was a perfectly normal way of doing business. No longer is every billboard on the Croisette and every second page in the trade press plastered with advertisements announcing future Golan ventures (few of which ever got made anyway). But the veteran Israeli mountebank (who, or so the story goes, recently staged The Sound of Music in Yiddish) still talks a good picture. The Road to Glory, he explains, is the story of a Cantor in 19th- century Russia who “becomes very famous, but betrays his faith”. It has elements of both Crime and Punishment and Fiddler on the Roof (Golan claims to have discovered Topol).