Linklater serves up meaty offering

US director Richard Linklater is a Cannes rarity - a film-maker with two movies showing in different sections of the festival.

Richard Linklater
Ten films in, Linklater says he feels his career is "just starting"
Towards the end of Fast Food Nation, his entry in the main competition, two characters walk through the killing floor of a giant meat-packing factory, surrounded on all sides by mechanised slaughter and cattle carcasses.

It is a disturbing and emotive climax to his film; a scene which Linklater describes as the hardest filming of his life.

"It was a lot like being a soldier and seeing your buddies on either side of you being shot," he tells the BBC News website. "You can't feel at that moment."

Sat in the Grand Salon in Cannes' Carlton Hotel, he has the crumpled look of someone with jet lag who only received his wake-up call 30 minutes earlier.

But he also seems remarkably at ease for a man in Cannes for the first time and facing a gruelling day of interviews.

And he is clearly enjoying having two movies - A Scanner Darkly is in the Un Certain Regard section - to show off: "I am making up for lost time."