It's All Or Nothing for director Mike Leigh as Cannes is offered a slice of British life

The Brits took over Cannes yesterday and the film festival was treated to the whole spectrum of the nation's creative gloom, brilliance, eccentricity and razzmatazz.

First, Mike Leigh had sections of the celebrity audience – and journalists at an earlier screening – in tears with one of his bleakest and most compelling worst. All Or Nothing, starring Timothy Spall and set on a south London council estate, immediately became a hot tip to win the coveted Palme d'Or next week.

Then Leigh, despite the presence of much of the Holly-wood movie industry, publicly lamented the dominance of high-gloss Tinseltown product on British screens, saying he took his inspiration from reality, rather than fantasy.

Stephen Fry camped it up when he announced his directorial debut. Bright Young Things, with Dame Judi Dench and Peter O'Toole, will be Fry's own adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1930s satire Vile Bodies. "I am about as excited as a human being can be without being arrested," he said. "That's why I am wearing a leather jacket at Cannes during the hottest day of the year. The film is essentially a story about nightclubbing, drugs and drink, so has nothing in connection to the modern age."

Offering another slice of British life, it was announced that Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols manager, is making a film about football hooliganism, adapted from Bill Buford's book Among The Thugs. McLaren said: "It's from Ibiza to Millwall and back. All these people who were sent down for football violence, as soon as they got out of jail they were the guys organising all the raves in Ibiza."

It was also announced that Sir Tom Stoppard would be adapting Philip Pullman's award-winning fantasy book trilogy His Dark Materials for the screen.

And to cap it all, Jerry Hall breezed into a beach party with a list of her projects, top of which is completing an Open University humanities course "to inspire my children to go to university".

She is also about to play the Bette Davis role in a stage adaptation of the Hollywood classic movie, All About Eve. Rupert Everett will co-star.

But the main event was Leigh'sAll Or Nothing. The story is about three working-class families, all of whom experience an emotional journey and suffer from the need to be loved. Leigh, who is separated from his wife, the actress Alison Steadman, said: "This is a very emotional film. For me personally it comes from very deep feelings about love and relationships and just coping with living. It has elements of my own feelings and my own life and experiences. It just comes from a whole lot of emotional and intuitive feelings."

He said Britain needed to make "more serious and indigenous films". Too many film makers lacked originality in an effort to be commercial. He said British screens were dominated by Hollywood product. "Sadly, folk in the UK tend to think a movie means Hollywood. I wouldn't go to Hollywood even if I was asked."