TIFF’s Saturday Night 4-Way Showdown!
It was ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ vs. ‘Roofman’; ‘Rental Family’ vs. ‘Good Fortune’; in our studio: Daniel Craig, Rian Johnson, Tessa Thompson, Maude Apatow & more
As I hustled home last night after back-to-back screenings, I got feedback from two different people on the same movie:
“It’s going to win zero Oscars.”
“It’s going to win everything!”
That’s pretty much where we are at this point in the Toronto International Film Festival, fresh off a bunch of high-profile world premieres and with opinions flying in every possible direction. The festival is known for its crowdpleasers, and last night’s two double-headers certainly delivered. The Channing Tatum-led Roofman earned raves, while the new Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, with Daniel Craig back as detective Benoit Blanc, finally unveiled some of its secrets. A few hours later, Brendan Fraser’s Rental Family tugged heartstrings as, across the street, Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut, Good Fortune, landed a ton of great jokes about the gig economy and AI. It was unfair to make those of us here at TIFF have to choose between all four, but there didn’t seem to be a bad pick in the bunch.
Speculation will now become rampant about who might win the festival’s People’s Choice Award, which won’t be announced for seven days. The prestigious honor, a typically reliable best picture bellwether, may very well go to one of those four world premieres, as TIFF exclusives tend to have an edge each year with the festival’s broad audience. I didn’t get to see Rental Family — I was at Good Fortune — but my colleague Christopher Rosen told me it delivers what’s expected and had the premiere audience sniffling throughout (Chris included). Still, having been in the crowd at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre for Wake Up Dead Man — with a prime view to spy Josh O’Connor watch himself deliver yet another phenomenal performance — I wouldn’t underestimate it. Director Rian Johnson introduced the film and said his favorite place in the world was that particular theater on the first Saturday of TIFF; his obvious affection for the festival, which launched both previous Knives Out films, might make audience voters want to send that love right back to him. (Glass Onion, the previous Benoit Blanc mystery, placed third in the audience award voting in 2022.)
Today, I’m gearing up for more interviews in our studio, including It Was Just an Accident director Jafar Panahi and The Secret Agent star Wagner Moura. Then, it will be time for my live onstage conversation with Train Dreams star Joel Edgerton — get your tickets if you’re in town! After that, the entire Ankler team will close out the day with our big party co-hosted with Letterboxd, so look out for full details on that tomorrow. (Email event questions to TiffEvents@theankler.com.)
Inside the Prestige Junkie Studio
Now, let’s recap yesterday’s whirlwind of video conversations and portraits from Chris Chapman in our studio, starting with the dynamic duo behind Wake Up Dead Man — but also featuring some industry heavyweights and ascendant talent, including Oscar winner Cillian Murphy and certified Ankler fan and subscriber Maude Apatow.
WAKE UP DEAD MAN: HINTS OF A FOURTH KNIVES OUT?
At the world premiere of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on Saturday night, the entire cast was watching the film for the first time right there, along with the regular audience. Well, the whole cast except for Daniel Craig. As Benoit Blanc himself, the detective cracking the mystery and the lead of all three Knives Out films, he gets to see it first. “I have no idea why, but I’m very grateful that he does, and even allows me to comment on it,” Craig told me earlier in the day. For writer and director Rian Johnson, there’s a pretty simple explanation. “We are, to a large degree, creative partners in this whole thing,” Johnson said. “Going forward, the barometer for keeping the films going is just, are both of us excited about making the next idea? The whole thing is just kind of the two of us forging ahead.”
I spoke to Craig and Johnson a few hours before the world premiere, and like co-stars Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close and the rest of the world, I also hadn’t seen the film. So we stuck to the broader contours of the Knives Out universe, and how Craig and Johnson welcome in a new ensemble cast with each film. “Rian immediately puts everybody at ease and says we’re here to play,” said Craig. “What do they call it with a horse, you give it its head? And with actors, it’s giving their head. That sounded wrong. There are better metaphors, but let’s stick with that one. You know what I mean.”
SIRĀT: A CANNES DARLING’S DEBUT
While I was seeing The Testament of Ann Lee on Saturday morning (more on that one in the coming days), my colleague Christopher Rosen got to chat with Óliver Laxe, the French-born Spanish filmmaker whose challenging features regularly premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and win awards. This year, Laxe’s fourth film, Sirāt, was no different: The Cannes jury prize-winning movie is so demanding of its audience that Laxe himself told the crowd during Friday’s North American premiere at TIFF that if they wanted to excuse themselves, they could do so without judgment.
“We are a society that is a little bit thanataophobic; we escape from death,” Laxe told Chris during their conversation on Saturday. “That’s why we are, in a way, immature. That’s why we have anguish. So through anguish, I wanted to take care of the spectator and invite him to experience death. I think that is the best way to dialogue with life.”
Sirāt, which Neon is set to distribute this fall, is a tough movie to describe — other than that, for certain critics, it’s one of the year’s best. Laxe’s genre-defying film is ostensibly about a father (Sergi López) looking for his missing daughter at a desert rave while accompanied by his son (Bruno Núñez Arjona). However, what happens from there is as shocking and unexpected as any recent release and has drawn comparisons to everything from Wages of Fear and Sorcerer to the Mad Max films and Apocalypse Now.
Said Laxe said about the film’s genre trappings: “That is the honey you need to get the spectator.”
GOOD BOY: A TEEN KIDNAPPED
Plenty of co-stars will tell you they really became a family while on the set, but few of them mean it quite the same way as the team behind the indie Good Boy. Director Jan Komasa, who made his name with Polish films like Warsaw 44 and the Oscar-nominated Corpus Christi, knew he was handing himself a challenge with the story of a teenage hooligan who is kidnapped by a seemingly mild-mannered couple who want to reform him into, well, a good boy. To find the right young actor, Komasa recruited legendary casting director Nina Gold, who then introduced him to 25-year-old Anson Boon. During our conversation on Saturday, Boon told me he was willing to wait for years for this movie to actually come to life.
With Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough playing the couple who kidnap and try to mentor Boon’s Tommy, and young actor Kit Rakusen as their watchful son, the cast built a kind of makeshift family while filming in a mansion in Poland. “We had a hot set, so we had the whole house available for the whole shoot,” said Boon, while acknowledging that since his character spends much of the film chained up in the basement, he didn’t exactly get to roam the whole house. “We were leading into summer in Warsaw, we were just all chucked into this crazy situation together, and by the end of the week we were a real family.”
Komasa, whose next film, Anniversary, hits theaters in October, is building his career at a fast clip — and currently seeking distribution for Good Boy. Still, Komasa has plenty of optimism about where the business is heading. “I feel like with the digitization of the whole human experience, people crave human contact and connection,” he said. “With the rise of AI everywhere, it can definitely help young filmmakers or up-and-coming independent projects to fill the streets with extras. But I think people still really need somebody’s work to look at. They want to know that there’s somebody responsible for the dream they’re watching.”
POETIC LICENSE: ANOTHER APATOW RISES
“I can’t cry on The Ankler!” That’s what Maude Apatow claimed near the end of our conversation about her debut feature film Poetic License, shortly after she gave an emotional thank-you to her cast, which includes Andrew Barth Feldman, Cooper Hoffman, Nico Parker and Apatow’s real-life mom, Leslie Mann. (To be clear, Maude, crying is absolutely encouraged here at The Ankler.)
It’s one thing to get a cast this good for your directorial debut; it’s another one entirely to make a really great film as a result. Poetic License, which is still seeking distribution as of this writing, is funny and tender, focusing on the friendship between two college seniors (Hoffman and Feldman) and the middle-aged woman (Mann) who audits their poetry class. Apatow’s debut, which premiered at TIFF on Saturday, recalls an earlier era, when romantic and funny films were way more common. I asked Apatow and her co-stars if Poetic License might be able to spark a bit of a comedy comeback, and also a burning question I’ve never been able to ask any other actor: how do you effectively act like you’re on mushrooms? Turns out Feldman has the perfect one-word answer: “Wonder.” You’ll just have to watch and see for yourself how he contextualizes that one.
STEVE: CILLIAN MURPHY, STAR AND PRODUCER
When you’re the lead actor and the producer on a small indie film, “You don’t sleep that much.” That’s what Cillian Murphy told me. Then again, he continued, “You never really do on film.” And the sleep sacrifice seems to be worth it for the Oppenheimer Oscar winner, who has made two films in the past two years with director Tim Mielants, each of them scrappy and deeply emotional. Their latest, Steve, will be released by Netflix later this month and is the result of a deep and remarkably open friendship between the actor and director. “I think I can be myself with CIllian, and he can be himself with me,” said Mielants. “I can share all my faults with him.”
Murphy plays the title character in Steve, a teacher at a boys’ reform school for children with behavioral difficulties. Still, much of the drama’s rambunctious and heartbreaking spirit belongs to the students, particularly a talented one played by Jay Lycurgo. The 27-year-old actor, who will also join Murphy in the upcoming Peaky Blinders movie The Immortal Man, said that Mielants gave him and his young co-stars room to discover their characters, while Murphy offered advice that still sticks with him: “Workshop a scene as much as you can. It’s such a simple thing. And that’s what’s going to happen when you’ve got a great group around you.”
HEDDA: A TWIST ON A COMPLEX WOMAN
Ever since Henrik Ibsen published the play Hedda Gabler in 1891, audiences have pondered a simple question, in the words of director Nia DaCosta: “What the fuck is her deal?” DaCosta’s new film Hedda is a boldly inventive adaptation of the play about a newlywed bored with her life and standing. In this new adaptation, out this fall from Amazon MGM, DaCosta set the action in the 1950s and cast Tessa Thompson as Hedda and Nina Hoss and Imogen Poots in a gender-flipped take on one of the film’s central relationships. But everyone involved in Hedda swears they don’t have the answer, either. “I think that’s what’s powerful about her,” said DaCosta. “She’s so worthwhile as a person, even though she does terrible things. Wouldn’t want to be friends with her, seems very dangerous, but I love her so much as a character.”
DaCosta and Thompson have been friends for many years and worked together on DaCosta’s 2018 debut feature, Little Woods. Thompson says that not only is DaCosta the only director who would think to cast her as Hedda Gabler, but she was able to maintain the energy and inventiveness of the film even when working long hours on set. “She’s so good at creating a sense of buoyancy,” said Thompson. “I don’t think that people think of Hedda Gabler as a buoyant piece necessarily, but I think our piece has a lot of fizz. And think that also is an expression of Nia — she’s fizzy.”