TIFF Day 4: Portman, Ansari, Luhrmann & The Ankler x Letterboxd Party
A full recap of our studio and shindig that had me up way past my bedtime
After three days of doing interviews tucked into a booth at Soluna Toronto, it was a marvel to see the space transformed last night into the home for the Ankler x Letterboxd first-ever TIFF party. As you’re about to read in a dispatch from the wonderful Kara Warner, it was a roaring success — and I was thrilled to see the teams and talent behind several of the films we’ve featured in the studio return to celebrate with us. Toronto can feel like a whirlwind for everyone, but last night was a great moment to toast everything we’ve accomplished — and then get right back into it the next morning.
Today, Christopher Rosen and I will be conducting the final round of interviews in our studio — keep an eye out for Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Ethan Hawke — and then I’ll head off to finally see Hamnet, which has been one of the hottest titles of Toronto just as it was in Telluride. For now, I’ll hand the reins over to Kara for the full party report. Then you can take a look at a few of the videos from the studio yesterday, including Aziz Ansari reflecting on the bruising Hollywood experience that brought him to Good Fortune and Natalie Portman explaining how she became the producer — and protector — for one of the most dynamic animated films of the year.
As a reminder, Prestige Junkie After Party subscribers can watch the replays of the Susbstack Lives Chris and I have been squeezing in where we can, where we have space to talk more about the movies we’ve seen. Coming tomorrow, paid subscribers will get to see the video version of my live onstage conversation yesterday with Train Dreams star Joel Edgerton, who is somehow even more thoughtful and warm than I expected. Don’t miss it!
On the Scene: Ankler x Letterboxd TIFF Party
The place to be in Toronto on Sunday night was the Ankler x Letterboxd’s invite-only TIFF party — sorry if you didn’t get on the list, but maybe next year!
Hosted by Ankler Media CEO Janice Min, Richard Rushfield and Letterboxd CEO Matthew Buchanan and COO Catherine Buchanan, the exclusive event was a highlight for attendees with a guest list that boasted a veritable who's who mix of tastemakers, studio executives, journalists as well as a few lucky local Ankler subscribers.
VIPs in attendance included Good Fortune writer, director and star Aziz Ansari, who was spotted happily chatting with members of the Letterboxd team. Also mingling about the packed room: The Handmaid’s Tale actress Nina Kiri, who arrived with and in support of her new movie Out Standing, and Rental Family director HIKARI, whose Searchlight Pictures film starring Brendan Fraser has already generated the kind of TIFF buzz that portends future awards success.
Additional attendees included executives Matthew Greenfield (Searchlight Pictures), Jon Glickman (Miramax), Vince Johnson and Maya Anand (Focus Features), Lisa Burgueno and Spencer Collantes (Neon), Arianna Bocco, Cate Kane and Kevin Chan (Mubi), Tyler DiNapoli (Bleecker Street), Helen Lee-Kim (Lionsgate) and Lori Conkling (Netflix) as well as producers behind several buzz-worthy festival titles: Rental Family, Son of the Sea and Train Dreams, with Hollywood insiders lining up to pay regards to the Buchanans, TIFF first-timers, and Richard.
The event was held at local hotspot Soluna Toronto, also the daytime home of The Ankler's inaugural Prestige Junkie studio, where Katey and Chris have been facilitating exclusive interviews with the festival's buzziest filmmakers and stars — including Ansari, Portman, Cillian Murphy, Tessa Thompson and certified Ankler stan Maude Apatow, who told Katey she’s been a subscriber since the beginning.
In the midst of the typical festival chatter about must-see lists, word of mouth favorites and potential Oscar contenders, guests enjoyed Mediterranean- and Latin American-inspired passed appetizers along with specialty cocktails with event-appropriate names like the Crowd Pleaser (think: margarita), the Festival Fashioned (an old fashioned) and Prestige Punch (a vodka drink that was just delicious).
Toronto native DJ Crunch kept the mood light and lively with a mix of modern hits and a few throwback jams, and guests received an exclusive “Crowd Pleaser” Ankler x Letterboxd tote bag on their way out.
All in all, a good night — and a great time — was had by all. As multiple people were overheard saying to Janice, The Ankler is essential to their jobs in the industry, with one person marveling, “The Ankler manages to be so informative and fun at the same time.” It seems like the Ankler x Letterboxd TIFF party is well on its way to becoming indispensable to their festival season as well. — Kara Warner
Inside the Prestige Junkie Studio
It’s impossible to thank Kara enough for all the work she’s done this week — and shoutout to the entire Ankler team, including Hanna Hensler and Kelly Butler, who are the best and pulled the party and whole weekend together.
But the show goes on, and below, check out my conversations with Ansari, Portman, and It Was Just an Accident filmmaker Jafar Panahi — as well as Chris’ chats with Baz Luhrmann and Dustin Hoffman and team Tuner (a movie Chris, exhaustingly, hasn’t stopped talking about since he saw it at Telluride).
GOOD FORTUNE: A REAL CITY OF ANGELS
Aziz Ansari had managed to make an entire season of television during the pandemic with Master of None. Then he endured the sudden shutdown of an entirely different movie (Being Mortal, which was shut down after a misconduct complaint against star Bill Murray) that was intended to be Ansari’s directorial debut. So after all of that, as you might imagine, the comedian and filmmaker was more than ready to laugh. “Life is the greatest comedy writer, and there’s always funny stuff,” Ansari told me on Sunday. It turns out that being on set with Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer and Keanu Reeves as an angel was a pretty good way to do that, too.
Soon after Being Mortal was halted, Ansari mounted his now-official feature directorial debut: Good Fortune, with Being Mortal cast members Rogen and Palmer. The Lionsgate comedy, about a guardian angel (Reeves) who meddles in the lives of a gig worker (Ansari) and a venture capitalist (Rogen), premiered on Saturday at TIFF and played through the roof.
Ansari told me about how he managed to make a comedy that actually looks great, working with The Studio’s Emmy-winning cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, and taking inspiration from Paris, Texas, to show both a gorgeous and realistic version of Los Angeles. We also talked about the learning curve of directing himself, why he actually loves test screenings, and how to hold an audience’s attention span in an era that makes it harder than ever.
“I feel very lucky that we are able to sneak this one in, and I hope it does,” Ansari said. “It’s definitely an underdog kind of movie, and if we just can wedge our way in a little bit, hopefully we can get some more original films and comedies in theaters.”
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT: SHOOTING IN SECRET
It has been 15 years since Jafar Panahi has been able to give interviews about his films, or see them with an audience, or even leave his native Iran to attend a film festival. But after years spent under house arrest and imprisonment in 2022 for criticizing the government, Panahi has been cleared of charges and is now free to travel, bringing his new film, Neon’s It Was Just an Accident, first to the Cannes Film Festival — where it won the Palme d’Or — and now to Toronto.
But given the restrictions the Iranian government places on filmmakers, Panahi still made his latest film in secret, using nonprofessional actors to tell the story of a group of dissidents who, like Panahi, had been jailed for criticizing the government. I talked to him about how he suffused the film with comedy despite the dark story, how audiences around the world have found something universal in the story, and how he finds hope — if that’s the word for it, at least — in seeing other Iranian directors make films their own way.
“Even though the film is made now, it is about some point in the future I am hoping to see have some more brightness in it,” he told me through his translator, Sheida Dayani.
ARCO: A FIRST FOR AN OSCAR-WINNING STAR
Oscar-winning star Natalie Portman has been producing films for more than 15 years. Still, she’s never worked in animation, much less on an independent, French-language project from a first-time feature director. But from her first meeting with filmmaker Ugo Bienvenu, when he first told her about his vision for his time-traveling saga Arco, she knew it was a challenge she was ready to take on.
Bienvenu calls Portman, who also lends her voice to the English-language dub, and her producing partner Sophie Mas the film’s “protectors,” which Portman says included everything from maintaining the story that Bienvenu imagined to making sure the animators could all work together in the same building in France. “It's such a unique vision, and you want it to be able to have that purity of voice that Ugo has,” Portman said of the Neon release, which focuses on a 10-year-old boy who uses a rainbow to time-travel to the past, where he meets a young girl. “Everyone has big life events happening — Ugo had two kids during the making of this movie. So having this kind of centralized space in Paris was super crucial for everyone to be able to be involved, support and also have lives. It is a five-year process you went through.”
EPiC: ELVIS PRESLEY IN CONCERT: A THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE UNMATCHED
Halfway through the world premiere of Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis Presley doc, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, at the 2,000-seat capacity Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto over the weekend, several attendees stood up and started dancing in their seats. The mania carried through to the end of the movie, which features previously unseen and rare footage of Presley’s Las Vegas residency at the International Hotel from 1969 to 1976.
“I made Moulin Rouge! I’d like to tell you that response happens all the time,” Luhrmann, whose crowd pleaser is still seeking distribution, told Chris on Sunday. “But it was kind of, in the best possible way, totally bonkers. They were applauding the numbers, but then, toward the end, some people in the orchestra sort of rushed the stage. I think they expected him literally to reach down and hold their hands. It was kind of crazy, but in a wonderful way.”
Despite having already made the blockbuster Elvis, an Oscar nominee that launched Austin Butler into stardom (“My kids said, ‘Gee, dad, that Elvis guy does a really good Austin Butler impression,’” Luhrmann joked), the director said the experience on EPiC made him appreciate Presley’s humor and musicianship even more. “I learned he was unbelievably uncomfortable off-stage,” Luhrmann said of Presley, who often did three shows a day during his Vegas residency. “But on stage, he was completely at peace.”
TUNER: A MOVIE MOVIE COMES TO FESTIVALS
When Oscar-winning filmmaker Daniel Roher (Navalny) was looking to leap from documentaries to narrative features, he knew what kind of movie he wanted to make: a movie movie, the type of project that littered the multiplexes in the ’90s and early ’00s.
“There’s a stigma in film culture that it’s got to be very serious, very brooding. I, very affectionately, refer to a lot of films that come out now as ‘Arthouse Garbage,’” Roher told Chris. “I love Arthouse Garbage! But I just wanted to make a movie that harkened back to some of my favorite movies.”
Roher’s reach for that bar is Tuner, a genre-mixing drama produced by Black Bear about Niki (Leo Woodall), a former piano prodigy turned piano tuner, whose extreme sensitivity to sound helps him become a safe-cracker. Following its premiere at Telluride, Tuner drew comparisons to everything from Baby Driver and Good Will Hunting to Thief and Crossing Delancy. “I wanted to movie really hard,” Roher said.
To help him get there, the Toronto native assembled a great supporting cast behind Woodall, including Havana Rose Liu (who learned how to play piano in three months for her role), Israeli star Lior Raz as Niki’s eventual crime boss and Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman as Niki’s kindly mentor. Hoffman has worked with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood — including Steve McQueen, Robert Redford and Tom Cruise — but he had high praise for Woodall’s presence and charisma.
“It’s not often that you work with new people where you say, ‘He’s a star.’ Leo is a star,” Hoffman said of Woodall. “He has a quality that is not only captured in life, but it’s on the screen. He jumps at you. You don’t see it very often.”
Yessss!! I love to see a Katey + Kara collab.