Here are a few things you won’t see in this first round of videos from our starry, cozy and wonderfully unpredictable studio here at Soluna Toronto: Sebastian Stan raving about Olivia Wilde’s performance in The Invite; Courteney Cox and David Harbour swapping stories about great tennis matches they’ve witnessed; and YouTube creators Ziwe and Mark Vins actually arriving early — an enormous rarity in the chaotic world of film festival interviews.
Don’t worry: What we captured onscreen is just as lively and fascinating, from a deep dive on why Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fjord is making waves in every country where it’s screened so far (including here in Canada) to the surprising advice Evil Genius filmmaker Cox received from one of the most famous directors alive.
Outside in Toronto, there’s buzz building for today’s big premieres, including Amazon MGM’s I Play Rocky and A24’s Misty Green. After day one in the studio, Christopher Rosen and I sat down for a live-stream conversation about what we’re hearing, before heading out for a night of after-parties:
We went live again this morning with Chris Feil, host of This Had Oscar Buzz and a friend of the pod, about Cannes acting winner All of a Sudden, Trash Mountain with Zooey Deschanel and Being Heumann (watch that one below). You can catch us live tomorrow to go even deeper into the festival goods and gossip on YouTube and the Prestige Junkie After Party Substack — we’ll be streaming at 9:30 a.m. ET, so start your day with us!
Now, before we get to the recap from the studio, here’s Chris with a report from the special Obsession screening on Friday night, one year after Curry Barker’s horror movie blew up TIFF’s Midnight Madness.
Obsession Mania
Despite countless world premieres and award contenders on the schedule, TIFF’s screening of Obsession — last year’s fest breakthrough that cost $750,000, was acquired by Focus Features for $15 million and ended up grossing $512 million worldwide — was packed. Better yet, the crowd was evenly split between fans who had already seen the blockbuster hit (Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams among them, seated dead center and proudly shooting his hand up when the audience was asked if they’d seen it) and newcomers ready to experience Obsession for the first time.
“Whoever’s sitting next to someone who hasn’t seen this movie, shut the fuck up,” filmmaker Curry Barker said during his introduction.
Barker and star Inde Navarrette, a best-actress hopeful, made the full-court press on Friday, sitting down with TIFF Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky for two conversations about their Gen Z fave. During both chats, the filmmaker and his star discussed how their lives had changed in the wake of the Obsession success — with Barker leveling up to direct A24’s remake of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Navarrette joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as X-Men hero Rogue.
“Steven Spielberg had some really good advice for me,” Barker said, name-dropping a legend who, if he’s in your corner during awards season, is quite the asset — as Katey found out at last year’s Governor Awards. “He said you have to treat each project like you’re starting over with your career. Obsession was cool, but you have to pretend like that never happened. How do you prove yourself again?”
Not to be outdone, and befitting of a young actress hoping to land her first-ever Oscar nomination, Navarrette chose three past acting winners to mention — a nod toward the kind of material she’s hoping to do after having such success (and a smart way of getting potential voters to think of her as more than just a scream queen).
“I’m really looking for really challenging myself with transformation,” she said. “I think of other actors such as Charlize Theron, Christian Bale and Viola Davis, who completely changed for The Woman King. I find it very, very fascinating to remove yourself in order to step into something else.”
Whether Navarrette can crack the best actress field — a group of contenders with Julianne Moore up top and little other consensus — by splitting the difference on her campaign between the young ingénue route (see Mikey Madison for Anora) and the horror-movies-matter brigade (see Amy Madigan for Weapons, Demi Moore for The Substance) will remain a cocktail party discussion for the next several months. But at the very least, she probably has Williams’ support. — Christopher Rosen
Studio Notes
And now on to the main event — our first round of conversations with some of the most fascinating people here at the festival — including Stan, Cox, Ziwe, Harbour and more.
Fjord: A Conversation Starter
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who won his second Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, doesn’t hesitate to say he wants his new movie, Fjord, to provoke people. “The purpose of this film is to generate debate — not about the film, but about the society in which we live,” Mungiu tells me. Set in a small Norwegian city, where a Romanian family — led by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve — has relocated with their five children, Fjord tracks the slow-burn conflict between a doggedly progressive community and the conservative family trying to raise their children there. Despite the title, the gorgeous visuals of a coastal Norwegian city and the specific cultures at the center of the film, Mungiu insists, “It’s not about Norway and Romania. It’s about this conflict that exists today in all societies.”
Stan, born in Romania and quick to bond with Mungiu when they first met a decade ago, has “made friends with discomfort,” he tells me. That’s a bit of an understatement — he earned his first Oscar nomination in 2025 for playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice, a film that, like Fjord, enraged people before they even saw it. In our conversation, Mungiu lightly teased Stan for the gaggle of fans who followed the Marvel star to Mungiu’s film festival in Bucharest when I, Tonya played there in 2018. “For the first time we had groupies!” he says. “A lot of girls flying all over the world to see Sebastian, and they knew what Sebastian was doing better than me.”
But Stan wants to ask tough questions of the audiences who will follow him anywhere, to Bucharest and beyond. “I worry about the solidifying that’s happening within people, not staying open and flexible and asking questions,” he says. “We should run towards our differences, not away from them. That’s what makes humanity interesting. So I think this is a movie that will push some buttons, but I’d rather be on that side than just give a repetitive, expected performance or opinion.”
Ziwe: No Stopping Her
At a TIFF event hosted by YouTube on Thursday, Ziwe debuted two episodes and a new trailer for the upcoming season of her interview show, You’d Be an Iconic Guest, which described her with a single word: “Unstoppable.”
“I feel unstoppable,” she tells me plainly. “Part of the creative process is that you find different obstacles, and I have a commitment to making this work. Whether that’s with traditional television or with YouTube, I’m going to make it regardless. YouTube honestly is a great platform, because it gives me the opportunity and the freedom to just put things out there.”
Part of being unstoppable is powering through even when an interview gets awkward or cut off entirely — in the new season trailer we see an anonymous guest get up and leave Ziwe’s set, though she’s not saying who it is yet. To Ziwe, that intense response is the entire point. “I just want them to react authentically,” she tells me, pointing out that she never could have anticipated something like former New York City Mayor Eric Adams trying to flirt with her on camera. “Whenever I feel like a guest is giving me what I want to hear, that’s when the interview starts to die. I give them a space to just be wild. I don’t want to have control. The control comes in the edit, where I have to take something that we shot and whittle it down to its most potent parts. But I like the chaos. I think that’s what makes it sticky. That’s why you feel life coming from the screen.”
Evil Genius: Comfort in Discomfort
Courteney Cox very famously knows her way around comedy. But not necessarily the comedy that comes from Evil Genius, which recreates the infamous 2003 “pizza bomber” case as a dark caper, led by Patricia Arquette as ringleader Marjorie and David Harbour as her co-conspirator and devoted would-be boyfriend.
“I love things that are either inappropriate or make you uncomfortable,” Cox, directing her first film in over a decade, tells me. “I tried to ride the tension of how horrible the crime was, but also show that these people are human; they’re doing their best in their life.”
Arquette, whose own directorial debut Gonzo Girl debuted at TIFF in 2023, and Harbour both tell me that being directed by someone who is also an actor makes a huge difference in navigating that tricky tone. “It’s really fun working with actors and working with people that turn you on with their art,” Arquette says. “Because it does feed you, and you do get better and you do learn other things from each other.”
“There is something about the humanness that we all were drawn to initially as actors, that I think we want to see the spark,” says Harbour, who joined our studio just days after winning his first Emmy as a supporting actor in DTF St. Louis. “I think that’s what I got from Courteney, an excitement about the work. As an actor, that’s what you want, because you walk into work every day going like, ‘I know she’s going to keep me on my toes,’ and I know she’s going to appreciate it when I really deliver.”
Mark Vins: Braving the Wild
Mark Vins, the host of YouTube’s Brave Wilderness channel, sees it this way: Every creator on YouTube is a filmmaker. When he and his collaborators started Brave Wilderness in 2014, he tells me, “We saw it as our sandbox and our gateway” — specifically a gateway to making a feature film, which Vins has just accomplished. His film Reef to Ridge, capturing the Galapagos Islands and particularly the spectacular Wolf Volcano, premiered at TIFF and will have a theatrical run before eventually making its streaming debut. Vins sees his decade-plus of YouTube videos about giant sharks and forest lobsters as “building up incrementally” to the point where he could make this full feature.
As Vins described the rare access he and his team got to film in the Galapagos and some of the wild creatures they found there, I realized his work is the antidote to some of the AI slop I encounter — inventing obviously fake volcanoes or animal activity and passing it off as real.
Vins tells me that Reef to Ridge uses AI for graphics, but he sees it as a storytelling tool that can be used “in a productive way and a non-productive way.”
He adds, “I think that the more honest you are as a creator, the more forthcoming, the better.”
Comments
Only Ankler All Access subscribers can comment
Already a subscriber?