Bono lapped up a standing ovation that lasted almost seven minutes after his new film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, according to reports.
The 65-year-old U2 frontman was presenting the new film Bono: Stories of Surrender, which captures the one-man show he performed at New York’s Beacon Theatre, combining anecdotes with performances of his songs.
Deadline reports that as the ovation reached the five-minute mark, Bono “jokingly started to unbutton his shirt to keep the applause going.”
After the noise had died down, the singer took the microphone and spoke a words of thanks in French.
He continued in English: ““I’m not a French man. I’m an Irish man. And I’m not a self-made man.”
As he pointed out his wife Ali and his longtime U2 bandmates, he continued: “You wrote this story. The Edge wrote this story. Adam [Clayton] and Larry [Mullen Jr.] wrote this story. [Band manager] Paul McGuinness wrote this story. We’re still writing it, Paul. Still a work in progress.”
Variety noted that Bono also shouted-out the actor and director Sean Penn, who was in the audience, saying: “If I was in the trenches, like real trenches, as opposed to ones on a movie set, I’d want to be with Sean Penn in those trenches. He was there for me. Thank you again.”
Andrew Dominik, the film’s director, is reportedly working and was unable to attend.
Stories of Surrender is a black-and-white film of the stage show of the same name, which Bono performed over 15 nights as part of the book tour to promote his 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.
The performance includes anecdotes about his band and family, as well as songs such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “With or Without You”.
In 2023, The Independent published an extract from Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story in tribute to the singer and actor Harry Belafonte, who had died aged 96.
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“In his 96 years on this planet, Harry Belafonte didn’t just leave a mark – he blasted the landscape, carved and etched roads and paths others could walk down, as activists and as artists,” wrote Bono at the time.
“He loved music and it loved him, but the fight for civil rights became the calling into which he poured his intellect, his clarity of purpose and his impatience with injustice. He had a voice and he used it.
“His friend Dr Martin Luther King Jr once said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. I think that’s true, but only if, like Dr King and Harry Belafonte, we grab ahold of it and pull. It was one of the honours of my life to know Harry Belafonte, and he taught me one of the most important lessons of my life – while tying his shoes.”
