CANNES (France): “Harry Potter” star Emma Watson abandons magic for pole-dancing and cat burglary in Sofia Coppola’s latest movie, one of two Cannes contenders on Thursday with twists on the girls-gone-wild theme.

“The Bling Ring” is based on true events in fame-fixated Los Angeles where a gang of teenagers in 2009 broke into the mansions of celebrities including Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox.

Snatching millions of dollars’ worth of jewellery and designer frocks, they sought to grab a piece of the A-list lifestyle, becoming minor social media stars themselves in the process.

“The story couldn’t have happened 10 years ago and so I thought it was an interesting story for a movie that said so much about our culture today,” Coppola told reporters. The British Watson puts on a Valley Girl accent to play Nicki, the product of New Age home-schooling and flashy consumer culture who links up with a group that learns that globe-trotting stars often don’t bother much with home security.

Watson said moving from her role as Hermione in one of cinema’s biggest franchises to an unsympathetic mall rat required her to take in hours of reality television.

“I watched a lot of the Kardashians, I watched a lot of Paris Hilton, I watched a lot of ‘The Hills’,” she said.

“It would be very easy for Nicki to feel like a parody, not real, and somehow I had to understand and empathise with her and that was really my biggest challenge, second to getting the accent down—it’s a very specific dialect.”

Paris Hilton, who leaves her house keys under her doormat, is an early victim and Coppola’s camera ogles her wardrobe of slinky dresses and hip-hop-calibre baubles, and a private nightclub festooned with animal prints.

It is there that Nicki gives Hilton’s dance pole a spin, prepping for nights out clubbing when she hopes to get noticed by a producer and be cast in a music video. Watson said Coppola allowed her to ad-lib and let her hair down on set, which she described as a welcome change.

“It was nice to work with someone that’s really spontaneous as well and I could work in a way that was a lot more loose than I was really used to—I’m used to really having to stick to my lines,” she said.—AFP