2
2
Tribute to Val Kilmer, the cult actor of Top Gun and Batman Forever
At the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, the documentary Val revisited the tumultuous career of actor Val Kilmer through never-before-seen footage he had captured himself during his film shoots. The former Batman appeared gravely ill, suffering from throat cancer. He has just passed away, at the age of 65, following complications from pneumonia.
Publié le 2 april 2025. Modifié le 4 April 2025.
Beyond the glitz and glamour, the Cannes Festival also offers unforgettable moments of emotion. We remember Alain Delon’s tears in 2019 when he received an honorary Palme d’Or for his entire career; or Vincent Lindon’s, as he declared he was receiving an award for the first time in his life while holding his Best Actor prize for his role in The Measure of a Man [by Stéphane Brizé]; not to mention Adèle Exarchopoulos’s sobs when she took the stage alongside Léa Seydoux and Abdellatif Kechiche for Blue Is the Warmest Colour…
At the festival’s opening that year, one film already had the power to shake Cannes audiences: Val, a documentary by Leo Scott and Ting Poo, looking back on the career of Val Kilmer, a cult figure of the 1990s who, for one feature film, embodied the legendary Batman.
A documentary on Val Kilmer at the Cannes Film Festival and broadcast on Arte
Distributed in the United States by A24 and Amazon Prime (and aired on Arte on March 2, 2025), the documentary offers an opportunity to restore the reputation of a legendary yet long-overlooked actor. Val Kilmer rose to fame in the late ’80s, working with some of the greatest directors—Oliver Stone, Tony Scott, and Michael Mann—for whom he portrayed now-iconic characters: Tom Cruise’s wingman in Top Gun (1986), Jim Morrison in the biopic The Doors (1990), or even Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever (1995). He also appeared in Heat, Tombstone, and True Romance.
A moving cameo in Top Gun: Maverick
However he quickly faded into obscurity: in 1997, he was replaced by George Clooney as Batman and went on to appear in a series of flops—much like Michael Keaton, as though the superhero were cursed for its actors—eventually making several direct-to-video films in the late 2000s.
Val aims to pay tribute to this unconventional career and often misunderstood man. Composed of unseen footage filmed by Val Kilmer himself on set—often without permission and selected from thousands of hours of video—the documentary, presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in the “Cannes Premières” section, also serves as a personal reckoning for the actor. Speaking directly to the camera, as if in complete intimacy, he reveals some of the inner workings of Hollywood, while struggling to speak due to his throat cancer… For his appearance in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), his voice had to be generated using artificial intelligence.
Val (2021) by Leo Scott and Ting Poo, broadcast on arte.tv (on VOD on Arte Boutique).
