Helen Mirren makes a regular pilgrimage to the South of France for the Cannes Film Festival with both her own films and L’Oréal Paris. She’s attended around 10 times — though she can’t be precise — and revels in the surrealism of it all: a convention town with one of the most beautiful backdrops in the world, standing on her hotel balcony getting paparazzied while looking down at women in fantastic gowns “looking like a flock of beautiful birds.”

“It’s that juxtaposition of working town, the beach, the weather, the Mediterranean, and then this crazy, mad parade of beauty,” she says. “In the middle of that is a very serious festival with serious art film. It’s a sort of wonderful, strange cocktail.”

L’Oréal’s Lights on Women’s Worth Award, which supports emerging female filmmakers, holds special meaning for Mirren. When she first started in the business, she was often one of only two women on set along with the “script girl.”

Now she sees progress and women supporting women. “For me, it’s not just the directors,” she says. “It’s the camera people, the sound people [and] all of those other roles that are available in the making of a movie. Whenever you have a female director, you have many more women on the set in general. They deliberately go out and find women to fulfill those roles.”

She calls the award “invaluable” for young female directors. “It’s the key that can open the door. It’s so hard to get a film financed. If you can go with that little star on your shoulder, it’s enormously helpful,” she says.

“I’m very proud of L’Oréal Paris for those kinds of initiatives,” she adds. “As well as making a fortune selling us lipstick, they conscientiously support women.”

Mirren has long spoken out about age representation on screen. “There will always be a desire to see youth and beauty on the screen. I mean, I feel the same, quite honestly,” she says. “But I think it’s the broadening of the stories that we tell. Casting then follows. People are living longer, and as people live longer, they have stories to tell. Between 50 and 100 years old, there are obviously roles for men and women.”

She doesn’t wish to be younger for vanity’s sake, only to see more of the changes she’s long hoped for. “The one reason I do wish I was younger is I would like to live longer to see, because I’ve waited 50 years for the changes to happen that I thought should happen when I was 16 or 17 years old.”

Still, she remains wary of the backsliding of women’s rights. “My great fear is that with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and what’s happening in America in general, you realize that lurking in the back is always this need, this desire to repress women,” she says. “You think of the way women were treated under Stalin, under Hitler. It was ‘get back there, have babies, and shut up.’ Be pretty, be sexy, have babies, and then shut up about everything else.

“I keep thinking it can’t take over, because women have come so far,” she says, though she notes that women are often still sidelined in political spaces.

“For all of my life, up to like 20 years ago, if I went to the movies, I only ever saw a vision of the world and culture and human relationships and stories and romance and adventure that was seen through a man’s eyes,” she says. “Now we’re seeing women’s view of the world about us. I think it’s really surprising a lot of people. I think they thought women would just make movies about romance and dogs or something.

“They are doing amazing, challenging, difficult, shocking stuff,” she says. “It’s great.”

Mirren also highlights the overdue conversation around menopause. “It’s amazing. Just in the last three years, suddenly it was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s such a thing as the menopause,’ and every woman goes through it,” she says. “It doesn’t happen when she’s 80. It happens when she’s 40, and so half of her life is going to be post-menopause. Why is nobody mentioning this?”

She adds that she hopes beauty brands will create products specifically for menopausal women who still want to look and feel great.

After filming several projects back-to-back, including “The Thursday Murder Club,” “1923,” “Mob Land,” and the forthcoming “Switzerland,” based on the life of author Patricia Highsmith, Mirren says she’s planning a break.

It will be a “big reset,” she says, including a return to her signature cropped hairstyle after growing it out during the pandemic. But it might not be for long.

“I work because I know if I don’t work, I’m intrinsically very lazy,” she says.