Jim Carrey winds up to lob a snowball at the photo shoot for Disney's A Christmas Carol in Cannes yesterday. (matt sayles/The Associated Press)

CANNES -- Jim Carrey says he is eager to see what happens to his gay romance, I Love You Phillip Morris, which has been shunned by North American distributors after French money got it made.

"Welcome to the plight!" Carrey told Sun Media yesterday in a brief exclusive interview. Carrey was talking about distributors backing off because of the film's sensitive subject matter and eroticized love scenes involving him and Ewan McGregor. At the Sundance filmfest, timid Americans were shocked by the intensity of the simulated sex.

"How do I get around it?" Carrey asked rhetorically about the resistance. "I don't! It falls wherever it falls. I can't do anything about it. I'm hoping that it has a chance to be seen but I just put it out there. It is a wonderful story. It is an amazing story and a gutsy script."

I Love You Phillip Morris, which debuts at Cannes today in the Directors Fortnight, was written and directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. Played as both comedy and drama, it tells the story of a married man (Carrey) who bursts out of the closet and becomes obsessed with another man (McGregor) and repeatedly goes to jail -- or escapes -- to be with his lover.

"Just create it," Carrey said of putting the work out there and hoping for the best. But the For Sale sign remains. Backers are hoping to strike a distribution deal at Cannes.

SCROOGED

There are no problems with the distribution of A Christmas Carol, the latest IMAX 3-D movie from director Robert Zemeckis. Carrey plays Ebenezer Scrooge as well as the Christmas ghosts. Disney is going full bore on the project for a November release.

It was introduced in Cannes yesterday with dazzling excerpts and a press conference, featuring Carrey, Colin Firth, Zemeckis and his partners in ImageMovers Digital. Zemeckis earlier did The Polar Express and Beowulf in the same controversial motion capture technique being used for a retelling of Charles Dickens' Yuletide favourite.

Disney executive Dick Cook promised audiences "a multi-sensory thrill ride" when the movie is finished. "It has everything. It has adventure. It has comedy. It has drama. It has action. It literally has everything and it is brought to you in 3-D!"

That is the sales pitch. But Carrey said attitudes towards motion capture are troublesome. "It is an odd situation. I see actors doing amazing performances in what is generally perceived by the audience as some sort of voice-over work. Of course, it's a lot more than that. In addition to a complete performance by an actor, you have these wonderful artists working in this cutting edge technology that can enhance the performance and take it to another level, to another place and time, like never before. But it is a complete performance."

Firth, who plays Scrooge's nephew, agreed. He said the work is real, even though audiences see a digital rendering of the actor in an artifical setting. "In some ways, it is more pure than any other way of working, once you're through the bizarre technological stuff."

Firth admitted he still does not have a clue how motion capture works. He also ridiculed "the spandex manhood-cancelling suit that you have to wear" for computers to capture performance nuances. "I still don't understand what they did to me and why."

Yet he found himself free to act, Firth said. "It is far less artificial in fact, I would say, than conventional filmmakering, where you're out of sequence and you're breaking it up all the time."

SNOWFLAKES

Carrey and girlfriend Jenny McCarthy, along with Firth and A Christmas Carol co-star Robin Wright Penn, played in the artificial snow yesterday in front of the Carlton Hotel, site of the Disney launch. The surreal spectacle drew huge crowds.

Carrey later explained it is a thrill to be at Cannes with two films as different as A Christmas Carol and I Love You Phillip Morris. "First of all, I feel so incredibly blessed at the variety of things that I am getting to do as an actor. When you start off talking out of your butt, you know, it is a long road to get to this place."

THE ANTICHRIST

Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, infamous for his outbursts, got into it yesterday over his rancid competition film, Antichrist, which debuted last night. After declaring himself "the best filmmaker in the world" at the film's press conference, von Trier bitterly tried to deflect criticism of his mad opus. The conference turned into a screaming match.

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