Cuban‑born Hollywood actor Andy Garcia’s passion project, Diamond, screened at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, some two decades ​after the Ocean’s Eleven star first conceived the idea while helping his ‌daughter with a school assignment.

Garcia directed and stars in the noir-inspired film that follows private detective Joe Diamond, who is hired by femme fatale widow Sharon Cobbs, played by ​Vicky Krieps, to investigate the murder of a wealthy businessman.

US actors Bill ​Murray and Dustin Hoffman also have roles as side characters.

When ⁠the 70-year-old who also wrote and produced the film learned it was going ​to screen out of competition at the festival, he said he could not ​have been happier.

Saying the film was like his child, Garcia told Reuters: “It’s the greatest gift in the world to celebrate your child’s achievement.”

Known for roles in films such as The Godfather: ​Part III and When a Man Loves a Woman, the Oscar-nominated actor has ​built a decades-long career in Hollywood both in front of and behind the camera.

Diamond is ‌his second ⁠fictional feature as a director after 2005’s The Lost City, a movie about pre-communist Cuba that also took years to bring to the screen and features Murray and Hoffman.

Although Diamond is set in modern-day Los Angeles, the detective and others ​around him are dressed ​as if they ⁠are in the past.

The concept traces back 20 years to when Garcia helped his daughter with a homework assignment ​for which she had to write a noir short story, ​and she ⁠got stuck.

“I improvised this character and scenes and stories and inner monologues just like in an hour, and it just sat there in my memory,” he ⁠recalled.

“I ​kept going back to it because of the ​love of the genre and just like, ‘Who is this guy? What’s he doing in L.A. dressed up?”