Cannes Gone Wild: Derek Ridgers’s Raw Photos Show the Film Festival at Its Most Unruly

When the photographer Derek Ridgers was working on his book, Cannes—a collection of raucous, glamorous, and half-naked hijinks he snapped at the legendary film festival between 1984 and 1996—he first toyed with naming the tome Nuts in May. He felt it was an apt title, one that captured the debauchery and bacchanalia of the moment. “It’s a bit crazy,” he recalled of the event in the ’80s and ’90s, when social media did not yet exist and photography only came in analog form. “It took me a while to understand exactly what was going on: it’s a festival of exhibitionism as much as a festival of film,” Ridgers told W from his home in London. “I personally, as a photographer, live for people who want to show off. Without them, the photographs would be very boring.”

No one could accuse the 100-or-so images in Cannes, published by IDEA, of being monotonous. Since the festival’s inception in 1946, the red carpet and Croisette have played host to some of the biggest stars in history, including Diana Ross, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, among thousands of others. But at the time that Ridgers was on assignment for publications like The Face, Time Out, and NME, the real peacocks were the folks on the beach and the boulevard, hoping to get their photo snapped. “Very often, I would get half an hour for my photo shoot assignments,” he said. “Then the rest of the time is basically free—you can kick about in the hotel or go out with your camera and have adventures, which is what I used to do.”

Ridgers would arrive on le Boulevard de la Croisette around 9 A.M., and wouldn’t leave until midnight most evenings. There, he caught a young Frankie Rayder in a red dress, and John Waters, in town for the premiere of his film Cry-Baby, being interviewed on the beach. In 1995, Elizabeth Berkley, then best known for Saved by the Bell was thronged by press for her starring role in the risqué cult classic, Showgirls, directed by the Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. “I was fascinated by it, and slightly drawn in,” Ridgers admits of the scene.

Of course, there is a healthy amount of nudity in the book—this was France in the 1980s, after all. Whether subjects were sunbathing topless or running naked through a fountain for photogs, there’s plenty to see within the pages of Cannes. “Some of the male photographers in the photographs, they’re showing themselves, really,” Ridgers says of the leering shooters. “I don’t necessarily put myself above those people—I was one of them. But we are not showing ourselves in our best light, I don’t think.”

In the context of 2025, Ridgers has a point—photography like the kind featured in his book, available May 15, isn’t as glamorous as the Cannes red carpet images that flood our feeds today. But a feeling of excitement and titillation permeates through the images all the same.

“It was very thrilling,” he said of the film festival back then. “It was quite an enjoyable battle to try and do it in the first place. It was all part of the fun.”