Al Gore
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Ken Burns
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The Telluride Film Festival is about a lot more than Oscars. Co-directors Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger certainly set out to program the year’s likeliest Oscar contenders, including Joe Wright’s Gary Oldman vehicle “Darkest Hour,” Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” starring Saoirse Ronan, Guillermo del Toro’s “Shape of Water,” starring Sally Hawkins, and “Battle of the Sexes,” starring a luminous Emma Stone as real-life hero Billie Jean King.6 Things We Learned at Telluride, Including Oscar Chances for Greta Gerwig, Angelina Jolie, and Gary Oldman https://t.co/xKCknGQBfe pic.twitter.com/q0LhYc0vn3— Anne Thompson (@akstanwyck) September 4, 2017
But Telluride was also a crucible for conversations about the state of the motion picture industry throughout the weekend, as Netflix and Amazon threw parties and checked out several high-profile movies without distribution — including Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Cotton Club Encore” — that banked on the festival boosting their critical and audience cred before top buyers.
1. Christian Bale is fat.
The subject of two well-deserved weekend tributes wore black all weekend to disguise his added bulk, as he is packing on the pounds (yet again) to play Dick Cheney in Annapurna’s “Backseat” for “The Big Short” director Adam McKay. Bale was in athletic movie-star mode in director Scott Cooper’s independently financed $35-million 19th-century western “Hostiles,” co-starring Rosamund Pike and Wes Studi, which played well over the weekend as it sought a buyer. I will catch the movie in Toronto, where even more distributors will see it. (When it’s on the release calendar, I will weigh in on whether or not Bale is Oscar-worthy.)Writer-director Cooper told me he would love to see “Hostiles” open this fall, so that Bale could be in the awards mix. (The trades played along, offering gushy Oscar bonafides.)
Truth is, it’s a light year for Best Actor contenders. But top distributors like Sony Pictures Classics have their fall awards slates well under way. Mounting something at this late date can be done (Fox Searchlight bought both Oscar-contenders “The Wrestler” and “Jackie” in Toronto), but it’s a tall order.
Producer John Lesher (“Birdman”), who developed the ’80s Donald Stewart script with Virginia-born Cooper (“Black Mass,” “Crazy Heart”), financed the movie with foreign sales and brought in producer-investor Ken Kao. They will weigh the best possible home for the violent western.
One likely buyer is deep-pocketed Netflix, which doesn’t have to support an expensive theatrical campaign and has beefed up its marketing team with Oscar-savvy former Lionsgate executive Julie Fontaine. However, if Bale’s Oscar campaign is the goal, Netflix has not proven its ability to push non-documentary fare into Oscar contention.
2. Paul Schrader is back.
Also for sale title was “First Reformed,” a rigorous, religious, and timely ecological fable that sees Paul Schrader in top form. Raised Calvinist, the writer of “Taxi Driver” and director of “Light Sleeper” crafts an elegantly formal homage to Robert Bresson’s “The Diary of a Country Priest.” Ethan Hawke plays a grieving minister fighting despair who finds some hope in a pregnant church member (Amanda Seyfried). The movie is both beautiful and ugly, intense and moving.Critics will point arthouse audiences to yet another brilliant Hawke performance. Again, is a distributor be willing to push this up the hill this fall? A home for 2018 is more likely.
3. Women on Top
Angelina Jolie (“First They Killed My Father”), Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”), Rebecca Miller (“Arthur Miller: Writer”), Chloé Zhao (“The Rider”), Agnes Varda (“Faces, Places,” with J.R.), and Valerie Faris (“Battle of the Sexes,” with husband Jonathan Dayton) are among the female directors earning rave reviews at Telluride.Jolie’s “First They Killed My Father” is based on Loung Ung’s Cambodian memoir about her middle-class family’s horrific experiences after they were forced out of Phnom Penh in 1975 during the four-year takeover by the Khmer Rouge. Jolie has been friends with the writer for 17 years and convinced Netflix to back the $24-million Cambodian war epic, which she whittled down to two hours and 16 minutes.
The well-mounted movie, told entirely from the point of view of a young girl (Sareum Srey Moch) and impeccably shot by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) with a sensitive score by Marco Beltrami, made audiences weep and scored a rapturous standing ovation. It could score some Oscar nominations, as well an official slot as the Cambodian Oscar entry. That’s an Oscar it could win.
We already knew Greta Gerwig as a smashing actress and writer (“Frances Ha,” “Mistress America”). With her feature debut “Lady Bird” (A24), a semi-autobiographical story from her high school days in Sacramento starring Saoirse Ronan and the superb Laurie Metcalf as her mother, Gerwig finds herself in the Oscar race as writer and director. Ronan and Metcalf may be there, too.
Ronan’s competition may come from two Fox Searchlight stars: Emma Stone as a sexily athletic and formidable sports star living a double life, and Sally Hawkins in Guillermo de Toro’s exquisite ’60s Douglas Sirk romantic fantasy-thriller “The Shape of Water.”
4. The British are coming!
Joe Wright’s “The Darkest Hour” was Telluride’s surefire Oscar contender, and Gary Oldman as a wily and messy Winston Churchill is the one to beat for Best Actor (not to mention Hair and Makeup). At a Telluride dinner, Oldman told me he channeled the Prime Minister’s inner child, and also compared him to Stanley Kubrick, who expected everyone on his team to step up to his standards and work ethic.Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn (“Bloodline”) said he couldn’t have been more shocked to be cast as King George VI— although he looks just like him. When “Theory of Everything” Oscar-nominated screenwriter Anthony McCarten tried to pick among possible writing gigs, a friend told him to do “Theory of Everything” producer Lisa Bruce’s “The Darkest Hour,” because “right now we need a leader.” So McCarten took on “Darkest Hour.” Wright told the opening night crowd that he only wanted to do yet another movie about Winston Churchil if Oldman played him.
At the closing night party at the Steinbergs, Wright told me (and admiring Amazon Studios executive Ted Hope) that he stole the idea for the film’s stunning out-the-window tracking shots from the Coens’ “A Serious Man.”
Other British films made a splash. James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli and memoirist Peter Turner spent more than 20 years developing “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” which details Turner’s affair with aging Hollywood star Gloria Grahame; it could push Annette Bening back into the Oscar race. At the Sony Pictures Classics dinner, star Jamie Bell said when doing research in Liverpool, he met several actors who had thought they might play his role over the years, from Ian Hart to David Morrissey.
5. The Academy throws a great party
I finally nabbed an invite to the Academy’s press-free annual Telluride gathering, which was packed with stars. Jolie huddled with Hawke. (They starred together in “Taking Lives” in 2004, as Hawke’s press agent Mara Buxbaum put it, “before she was Angelina Jolie.”) Gerwig, Faris, and Dayton commiserated about pre-world premiere jitters, while Bale had to get through his first Tribute.Still on the stump for climate change with “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Al Gore looked each new person in the eye and memorized their name. (I can testify to this skill, as he greeted me with “Hi, Anne!” the next night at Participant Media’s Telluride dinner, where he regaled the table with stories of living large on his world travels as Vice President — before getting serious about the potential upside of Hurricane Harvey for climate change.)
6. The foreign-language race is getting interesting.
The Russian Oscar committee could actually choose “Leviathan” director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes hit “Loveless” (Sony Pictures Classics) for its official submission, although Telluride also played its lower-profile rival, the dark family drama “Tesnota.” SPC’s other foreign possibility is Sebastián Lelio’s transgender drama, “A Fantastic Woman,” which played well with Chilean actress Daniela Vega on hand. Lebanon is expected to select Ziad Douieri’s “The Insult” (Cohen Media), which built buzz over the weekend.L.A. Times
Oscar buzz and movie love mingle at the Telluride film festival
Josh Rottenberg
The Telluride Film Festival prides itself on being unlike bigger, glitzier festivals. The atmosphere is decidedly low-key and intimate, with neither the deal-making frenzy of Sundance nor the black-tie glamour of Cannes. There are no red carpets, no juries doling out awards. Most of the venues aren’t even actual movie theaters — one is a middle school gym, another is an ice-skating rink and yet another is the town’s Masonic Hall.
“You think it’s a festival and it’s going to just feel like a festival but it doesn’t,” said Angelina Jolie, who attended the Rocky Mountain festival over Labor Day weekend for the first time to screen her latest directorial effort, the wrenching Cambodian genocide drama “First They Killed My Father.” “It’s a lot of nice people, and you get the chance to really talk and have some amazing conversations. I geeked out on Ken Burns.”
That said, Telluride isn’t only about filmmakers and stars convivially communing in jeans and untucked shirts — though there is plenty of that. In recent years, the festival has taken on an increasingly important role in the awards-season ecosystem, having hosted seven of the last eight best picture winners. So as the 44th edition of the fest unfolded, Oscar prognosticators had their antenna finely tuned to pick up reverberations of buzz — and in what was widely seen as a strong crop of films, several got an early leg up on the long climb ahead to potential Oscar glory.
Screening in the same opening-night slot in which “Moonlight” played last year, actress Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, the coming-of-age dramedy “Lady Bird,” made a major splash, with the audience warmly cheering the coming-of-age dramedy about a rebellious high school senior (Saoirse Ronan) who yearns to escape her hometown of Sacramento and her stormy relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf).
“It was intimidating to be in the same slot that ‘Moonlight’ was in, but it’s not a thing I feel like I could ever live up to,” a very relieved Gerwig told The Times the next morning. “I didn’t feel as if I had to pass the ‘Moonlight’ bar. So in a way it was just an honor. I just felt like it was very warm and kind.”
Director Guillermo del Toro’s typically off-kilter and surreal adult fairy tale “The Shape of Water” — the story of a mute janitor (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with an aquatic humanoid creature in a secret government laboratory — built upon the wave of rave reviews it earned after premiering at the Venice Film Festival.
While films with fantasy elements sometimes have a difficult time being taken seriously by critics and Oscar voters, Del Toro brushed aside any concern about being placed in a box. “That would be important if I cared — but I don’t,” the director said bluntly. “Look, I’ve been doing this for 25 years. If I thought it was not the route to go, I would have changed.”
Perhaps not surprisingly given these turbulent geopolitical times, films dealing head-on with real-life conflict also resonated with festivalgoers. Jolie’s film about a young girl whose family is swept up in the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s savage revolution in 1975, which will be released on Netflix and in select theaters on Sept. 15, drew a standing ovation in its first major screening outside of Cambodia.
Director Joe Wright’s World War II drama “Darkest Hour,” which chronicles Winston Churchill’s attempt to unite Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany as Hitler’s army rampages across Europe in 1940, also earned its share of acclaim. Nearly unrecognizable underneath makeup and prosthetics that took over three hours to apply each day, Gary Oldman humanizes Churchill as a sometimes erratic and overly emotional but brilliant leader in a performance that is sure to put him in the heart of the lead actor conversation.
In a Q&A following the film’s last screening, Oldman said immersing himself deeply in the role of Churchill had rekindled his love of acting after doing too many films that felt rushed and creatively undernourished. “It was a real joy,” he said. “Until this film, I had really started to lose my love of the work, of why I wanted to do it in the first place.”
Among the festival’s documentaries as well, a number of films confronted weighty and contentious issues, including “Eating Animals,” an investigation into the ills of factory farming produced by Natalie Portman, and Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei’s “Human Flow,” an epic, nearly three-hour look at the global refugee crisis.
On a somewhat lighter note, “Battle of the Sexes” — about the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) that turned King into a feminist icon — received a warm reception at its first-ever screening, with the audience rising to its feet when husband-and-wife directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton introduced King herself.
Director Alexander Payne’s bizarro satire “Downsizing,” which had been met with raves out of Venice, drew a somewhat more divided response from the Telluride crowd. To be fair, though, a film that takes so many big creative swings — set in a near-future in which scientists have figured out how to shrink people down to 6 inches in size — was likely never going to be for all tastes, and “Downsizing,” which won’t hit theaters until December, will certainly have its passionate supporters as awards season unfolds.
Director Scott Cooper’s brutal western “Hostiles,” which is seeking distribution, drew a number of glowing reviews, with many singling out the performance of Christian Bale as an Army captain who reluctantly agrees to escort an ailing, elderly Native American (played by Wes Studi) to his tribal home. Bale himself was honored, along with cinematographer Ed Lachman (represented in the lineup by Todd Haynes’ period drama “Wonderstruck”), with a special tribute by the festival. As he moved around Telluride over the weekend, though, the actor often passed festivalgoers unnoticed, having packed on some pounds to play Dick Cheney in an upcoming film from director Adam McKay.
Notably, at a time when many have criticized Hollywood’s lack of gender parity in the hiring of directors, roughly a third of the films at this year’s festival were either directed or co-directed by women. Meanwhile, a free, open-air panel called “Real-Life Wonder Women” — featuring Jolie, Portman, King and legendary chef Alice Waters — drew what appeared to be the largest crowd to any such panel in the festival’s history.
“I’d like to get to the point where [the number of female directors] is not a conversation,” Jolie told The Times. “We’re going to have to work a little bit harder, but I think if we support each other, then women in this business will move forward. But we have far to go.”
Speaking of having far to go, awards season is a marathon, not a sprint. With the Toronto Film Festival set to kick off later this week and a slew of potential heavy-hitters yet to be unveiled, would-be contenders need to pace themselves.
For her part, Gerwig was simply gratified to have made her first step along that journey in the nurturing environment of Telluride. “One of my favorite things about Telluride — and it’s been very vivid this year — is because it’s so small the directors are really there for each other,” she said. “That has been the most meaningful thing — you look at another director and they feel the very same thing you feel, this combination of relief and fear.”
Director Scott Cooper’s brutal western “Hostiles,” which is seeking distribution, drew a number of glowing reviews, with many singling out the performance of Christian Bale as an Army captain who reluctantly agrees to escort an ailing, elderly Native American (played by Wes Studi) to his tribal home. Bale himself was honored, along with cinematographer Ed Lachman (represented in the lineup by Todd Haynes’ period drama “Wonderstruck”), with a special tribute by the festival. As he moved around Telluride over the weekend, though, the actor often passed festivalgoers unnoticed, having packed on some pounds to play Dick Cheney in an upcoming film from director Adam McKay.
