Skarsgård, ‘KPop’, & the Obamas’ Latest in Our Studio
TIFF day 2: Katey reveals her conversations with top awards contenders and tonight’s showdown; Rushfield takes in ‘The Lost Bus’
It’s Saturday in Toronto, and I’m Katey Rich. Since I last checked in with you, Sydney Sweeney has built some very real Oscar buzz with her boxer biopic Christy, many more people have cried their way through Cannes hit Sentimental Value and our own Richard Rushfield endured the stress test of watching Paul Greengrass’ wildfire thriller The Lost Bus, which you can read more about ahead.
As for me, I’m facing the eternal dilemma of having enough time to actually see movies while also interviewing so many of the people who make them — we’ve got more than 15 people coming through our Prestige Junkie studio today and then a ton of major premieres later tonight. As you read this, I have hopefully made it into the press screening of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, which premiered at Venice a few days ago and has built buzz not unlike what happened last year for The Brutalist, which Fastvold co-wrote. Given that the TIFF press screening queue for The Brutalist nearly resulted in fisticuffs last year, I’m hoping to get in line early enough to avoid a melee this time.
While I’ll practice my right jab, let me pass things over to Richard…
The Lost Bus: Reminder of What H’wood Was
Making its debut at the luxurious Princess of Wales Theatre on Friday night was the Paul Greengrass thriller The Lost Bus, starring Matthew McConaughey as an elementary school bus driver who must save a group of children being evacuated from the raging Camp Fire, California’s deadliest wildfire, as the flames close around them.
As directed by Greengrass, a master of turning real-life tension into big-screen thrills, the film is gripping and entirely cinematic. The audience in the giant theater barely breathed for the two-hour running time. The question is, how many people will eventually see this movie — which Apple will distribute in a limited theatrical release starting on Sept. 19, before it begins streaming on Oct. 3 — in this kind of setting, or at all?
Three years ago, Ron Howard was here with Thirteen Lives, a similarly ripped-from-the-headlines, gripping and entirely cinematic tale of a group of trapped miners in Thailand. Despite distributor Amazon’s attempt to get the film into awards contention, and despite it playing like a classic thriller, it struggled to find an audience. Ripped-from-headlines, real-life thrillers were once a box office staple. Dog Day Afternoon and Apollo 13 are two that come to mind. There is no reason to think that audiences wouldn’t love this sort of film — and this film, specifically — today. But it seems like yet another genre that Hollywood can’t figure out what to do with anymore. Here’s hoping The Lost Bus finds its way to the audience it deserves.
In the post-screening Q&A, Jamie Leigh Curtis — who produced the film with Jason Blum, after she heard about the story of the real-life bus on NPR — told of first talking with the pair on whom the movie was based. After getting involved in the film, she called up bus driver Kevin McKay, on whom the McConaughey character is based. When they spoke, McKay told her, “You and I share a bond.” He explained that 2018’s Halloween franchise relaunch, which starred Curtis and was produced by Blum, came out the day before the fire and was the last movie he saw with his mother before the events. Curtis then called Mary Ludwig, the elementary school teacher (played by America Ferrera), who shared McKay’s journey and battle. After saying hello, Ludwig also told her, “You and I share a bond.” Curtis asked again, what is that? “Your mother went out with my dad,” Ludwig said. Indeed, it turned out that a very young, pre-stardom Janet Leigh of Merced, Calif., long before she married Tony Curtis, had indeed been high school sweethearts with Mr. Ludwig, many years before.
The connections didn’t end there. McConaughey, in his turn, told the story of how his son came to be cast in the role of his onscreen son. You can watch that anecdote below, and stay tuned for more from me this weekend. — Richard Rushfield
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Now, Inside the Prestige Junkie Studio
Thanks, Richard! Below, take a look back at the first day of the Prestige Junkie studio and the conversations I had with everyone from K-pop idols to Oscar winners to a former vaudevillian turned international icon. Truly, only at TIFF.
KPOP DEMON HUNTERS
When the team and I were first planning our video studio here, I hoped we would book the talent behind at least a few films that would go on to catch fire with audiences. I never imagined I’d talk to the people behind what is indisputably the film of 2025 so far.
But when the directors and singers from KPop Demon Hunters ask if they can stop by, you say yes, no matter what. That is how directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, and singers Rei Ami, Audrey Nuna and Kevin Woo, became the first visitors to the inaugural Prestige Junkie interview studio.
During our interview (watch it above), I got to ask all five of them about how they’re processing the global phenomenon of the film — not only is KPop Demon Hunters the biggest movie ever on Netflix, but its soundtrack has enjoyed similarly record success with billions of streams and multiple singles in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. I specifically wanted Kang and Appelhans to rewind to how they crafted the songs that have taken over the world.
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“I think we were in a little bit of denial of how much this was a musical,” Kang told me. “We always presented it as a non-musical; our characters are pop stars, and so they just naturally sing. So we knew that the music was going to be part of the story, but it was very much like, ‘Oh, you can’t just have two minutes of music without progressing the story, the plot and the characters.’ Once we realized that, whenever we discussed music, it became a big story session. It was a very difficult process, but really helpful in building the film out.”
THE EYES OF GHANA
The next group in the studio hasn’t conquered the world just yet. But the filmmakers behind the documentary The Eyes of Ghana were just as energetic, particularly in the wake of their Thursday night world premiere that came with a special video introduction from executive producers Barack and Michelle Obama. Director Ben Proudfoot, already a two-time Oscar winner for best documentary short, isn’t just exploring a period of African history and introducing much of the world to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah; he and his collaborators are on a rescue mission that extends far beyond the film itself. As Proudfoot and producers Nana Adwoa Frimpong and Anita Afonu, along with director of photography Brandon Somerhalder, told me in our conversation, any profit made from the film will be reinvested in efforts to restore historic Ghanaian films that would otherwise be lost to history.
I planned to ask everyone who came into the studio what they thought it would take to get audiences back into theaters; I had no idea that The Eyes of Ghana would end with more or less a dream scenario, with a group of moviegoers gathered at a newly restored historic theater in Accra to watch the restored work of the film’s subject, 93-year-old filmmaker Chris Hesse. So when I asked the team what it was like filing that moment, Afonu—who lives and works in Ghana, and helped gather the crowd for that special night at the movies — told me how she thinks The Eyes of Ghana specifically could inspire a new love of cinema across Africa, and maybe even around the world.
“It is so important that film students are able to access these films and see that, truly, there was a time in Ghana’s history where films were being made,” she told me, before explaining the concept of sankofa, an Akan-language term that means, in essence, to learn from one’s past. “In the process of referencing your past, that is how you can figure out your future,” she said. “Once these films are made accessible, young people will see there was somebody who tried to make films, and there was a president who understood the power of the image.”
When you hear her talk about it, you really can’t help but feel inspired too.
SENTIMENTAL VALUE
Before Stellan Skarsgård could become a stage actor, film actor or internationally recognized icon, he had to run away with the circus. At least, that’s what the 74-year-old actor and budding Oscar contender told me early in our conversation yesterday, explaining that working on a traveling vaudeville show as a teenager taught him a whole lot about showmanship and the chaos of the creative life. At the very least, he says, it prepared him for being in two Mamma Mia! movies. “We’re doing our best to entertain people and flee from reality,” he said.
Skarsgård’s latest film has no fire-eaters or carnival barkers but has still managed to win over festival audiences for most of the year. Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (the festival’s ostensible runner-up prize to the Palme d’Or) and may be even more beloved in Toronto so far, has earned the veteran actor some of the best reviews of his career. (That is really saying something, considering Skarsgård has made what he estimates is more than 150 movies.) I asked him about working with director Joachim Trier and building the kind of trust required to give that kind of performance, but also more broadly about what he’s learned from the business in all these years — and what might be his secret for avoiding assholes entirely.
“It consists of treating people like humans,” he said. “It sounds simple, but it’s not always.”
MADDIE’S SECRET
So many people in the movie industry have had the dream of making a movie with their friends that’s cheap enough that someone else is actually willing to pay for it. John Early actually managed to pull it off with Maddie’s Secret, a love letter to ’80s and ’90s movies of the week as well as ’50s Hollywood melodramas, all set in the very modern world of food influencers and L.A. hustle culture. If it feels more like a throwback, though, that’s both intentional and very convincing; Early’s co-star and longtime collaborator Kate Berlant caught herself referring to the movie “if we had made it today” — as if it hadn’t actually wrapped production in Los Angeles just a few months ago.
Making a scrappy indie with people you love is never exactly easy — Early filmed inside his own house to save money, which looks great onscreen, but he also admits it was “a hell of my own making.” But it adds to the irresistible DIY spirit of Maddie’s Secret. Early wrote, directs and stars in the new film, playing the titular Maddie, a wide-eyed blonde whom Early describes as that lost Hollywood type, “the ingenue.” And how does he manage to capture that kind of boundless optimism about L.A. and fame after so many years of building his comedy and acting career? Well, you’ll just have to watch our conversation — and then Maddie’s Secret, once it finds a distributor — to find out.
Coming Attractions
You thought that was a lot of conversations? Today will be even busier —including scheduled conversations with Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Tessa Thompson, Cooper Hoffman, Maude Apatow and many, many more — and if you follow The Ankler on Instagram, you can watch some of it in real time. Once we get through all of that, everyone covering the festival will be facing one of the most brutal TIFF scheduling head-to-heads I’ve ever seen. The world premiere of Roofman — the Paramount release from director Derek Cianfrance that looks like the major star turn from Channing Tatum we haven’t had nearly enough of, plus the eternally-welcome Kirsten Dunst as a supporting player — is set for 5:30 p.m. local time. Just half an hour later, and right across the street in another theater, it will be the world premiere of Wake Up Dead Man, the newest Knives Out film from director Rian Johnson. Yes, you read that right: two major world premieres, and no way for anyone to catch them both.
At a festival as big as Toronto, you’re inevitably going to have some unfortunate conflicts. Still, this particular matchup is tormenting many of the journalists I know, particularly the ones who would otherwise be spending Saturday evening at Sony Pictures Classics’ annual, lavish, lovely steak dinner uptown. Both films will be screening again in the festival for press, but come on — Toronto is a festival that’s all about the audiences, and why come all this way to miss the ecstatic audience response to some of the biggest movies of the festival?
Later that evening, there’s another matchup that’s a little less high profile but still a personal challenge: Rental Family, the Brendan Fraser vehicle backed by Searchlight, is premiering 45 minutes before the start of Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut, the Lionsgate comedy Good Fortune. Between myself and the rest of the Ankler team, we’ll manage to see all of them — and I’ll squeeze in a Substack Live with Christopher Rosen; details here — so check back tomorrow for the rundown and a whole new round of videos and portraits to pore over.