As tempting as it was to stay longer on the more sensible side of Lake Ontario, I’m home from Toronto and still sifting through my thoughts about a busy week of seeing movies, talking movies and speculating about movies in the Oscar race at every opportunity. That we also covered the Emmy Awards and interviewed more than 50 people during that time (watch them all on YouTube) — well, this newsletter will be dark on Monday, and you can probably imagine why.
So today I’m sharing my six biggest takeaways from this year’s festival, answering many of the questions I posed on my way to Toronto last week and asking a few new ones. But first — a few final videos to share from our interview studio at Toronto’s wonderful Soluna restaurant, plus one last round of fabulous portraits from Austin Hargrave and his team. It takes dozens of people to make a studio like this happen, so please indulge me in my own small acceptance speech:
Thank you to The Ankler’s own Jen Laski, executive producer of brand experiences, and Hanna Hensler, our director of marketing and events, for managing the incredible logistics that make a studio like this possible. Plus, extra special mention to design director Kelsey Stefanson and social and audience team members Abby Barr and Alyssa Karas; to the folks at Central Talent Booking, especially Emily Lallouz, for helping make sure so much great talent stopped by, and to the endlessly cheerful Kara Warner for making everyone feel welcome when they arrived; to the lovely video crew of Nicole Shapiro, Natasha Zimin, Alexandra Huynh Do, Gabriel Dinardo, Jane Lukashova, Lily Chiasson and Ishi Kshattriya; to the tireless editors Sebastian Doughty and Helen Nguyen; to Austin and his team of Kyle Kirkwood and Emma McCabe; to production assistant Drew Gabrielle Cuencaho; to everyone at Soluna who welcomed us back for a second year and kept us fed and caffeinated; and finally to all of you, for watching and reading and making it all worth it!
The Beloved: Movie Magic
What is it like to make a movie about making movies? Thrilling but also confusing, according to The Beloved stars Javier Bardem and Victoria Luengo.
“It was very weird, because we were shooting with two different cameras, two different ways,” says Luengo, who plays the daughter of a famous film director who is reluctantly recruited to star in his new film. “Sometimes when the crew in the film said cut, our crew felt they needed to cut.”
“Our first assistant director said cut three times — ‘cut, cut, cut!’” says Bardem, who plays the film’s fictional director. “That was for us to understand that it was our movie.”
Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen wanted the film to feel experimental, both in his use of a wide range of film stocks and how he worked with Bardem and Luengo, who shot the film’s opening scene — an awkward lunch between father and daughter — in real time. “I wanted to throw myself into this and do it in a very intuitive way,” says Sorogoyen — an intuition that his actors clearly appreciated. Adds Bardem, “We had a freedom that is not so common on many other movie sets.”
Possible Love: Couples Retreat
Just minutes before the cast of Possible Love sat down for our conversation, they gathered around a phone to watch the film’s director, Lee Chang-dong, accept the Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. The cast’s admiration for the director was palpable in that moment, as it was when I asked them how Lee works in a way that no other director does.
“Director Lee asks of us, ‘Do not perform. Do not express, and try not to prepare too much,’” says Sul Kyung-gu, who plays the husband in one of the two couples at the center of the film. “He always asks us to be there and present as a blank slate, and just accept everything. He really wants you to live out the daily lives of these characters.”
Possible Love’s story starts as an unlikely friendship, with a documentarian played by Parasite’s Cho Yeo-jeong working on a film about workers laid off at a rural factory and befriending the wife of one of the workers, played by Jeon Do-yeon. The gap in wealth and privilege between the two families eventually leads to conflict but also an unexpected understanding, both between the couples and within the original family units.
Zo In-sung, who plays the documentarian’s husband, says the title carries many meanings, but it was more important to live in the moment while making the film. “Lee would say that while there is meaning that you have to carry, don’t try to think about it too much. Just keep it in your heart.”
6 Big Takeaways from TIFF
As I left for Toronto last week, I relayed multiple questions I planned to ask during my week up north.
Now, I’m back with some answers…
1. Venice Faves Keep Momentum
In almost every case, the answer to whether a film from a previous festival did as well at TIFF is a resounding yes. Most years, we get a handful of movies that arrive from other festivals on a wave of hype only to crash on the friendly Canadian shores (well, the audiences at TIFF are friendly; the critics can be less so). This year, though, basically everything continued its momentum, with Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine and Possible Love earning raves at TIFF just days after taking home prizes at the Venice Film Festival.
The one possible exception is Danny Boyle’s Ink, which opened Venice to warm reviews but seemed to land a little cooler in Toronto, at least in my anecdotal experience. This might be a cultural divide worth watching as the season continues, or perhaps residual unrest over Boyle’s AI comments (which came up during one of the screenings in Toronto). European audiences are presumably more familiar with the tabloid newspaper era that Rupert Murdoch kicked off by buying The Sun in the late 1960s, which is the focus of the film. Americans, meanwhile, mostly think of Murdoch for his cable news juggernauts, which appear only in a swift montage at the very end. With Netflix backing it, Ink still has plenty of time to find its audience on both continents.
2. Telluride’s Tearjerkers Leave No Eyes Dry
By the time I finally caught Elsinore as my final screening of the fest, I’d heard plenty about the standing ovation that greeted star Andrew Scott following the Canadian premiere — basically the TIFF equivalent of a hug from Oprah. Sincere and straightforward but very real in all the ways that matter, Elsinore worked on me big time, but even the film’s handful of dissenters agree that Scott’s performance is a marvel.
Elsinore definitely made the biggest splash of all the Telluride world premieres, but right behind it is Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, a quieter but equally devastating movie. Anyone who encountered Leigh during the festival made sure to tell you about it; the 83-year-old writer-director is a living legend, and with Tender Loving Care possibly his last film, everyone seems eager to celebrate it as a proper victory lap. The fact that one of the film’s stars, Kate O’Flynn, had to leave Toronto early to go to Los Angeles and win an Emmy for Widow’s Bay certainly doesn’t hurt!
3. Stand for Cannes
So about those standing ovations — TIFF has never really been famous for them, despite the enthusiastic audiences. Maybe that’s because no camera crews are inside the premieres to capture the talent’s reactions, which fuels a lot of the lengthy ovations at Cannes and Venice. Plus, in Toronto, people often rush off to their next thing before the credits even finish rolling.
But this year, the enthusiastic ovations for Elsinore, La Bola Negra and I Play Rocky (more on that one in a moment) got people talking; at the after-party for La Bola Negra on Tuesday night, the Netflix team seemed slightly overwhelmed. The century-spanning epic about queer identity from directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi is clearly Netflix’s top awards contender, and I would bet a boost in the form of a Toronto people’s choice award is in its near future. (Also in the future: More from Los Javis, courtesy of my interview with them live from Toronto — look for that on Tuesday’s podcast.)
4. Best Actress Is a Race for Second
I had an all-time great film festival experience at the Sunday night TIFF premiere of The Debut, watching the audience explode at the end of a fiery scene between Paul Giamatti and your confirmed frontrunner for best actress, Julianne Moore. (Director Jesse Eisenberg talked about the response to that specific moment with Christopher Rosen in our studio; watch!) It’s boring to declare an Oscar race to be over in mid-September — and lord knows we’re wrong about these things as often as we’re right. But Moore’s performance in the terrific A24 movie is a true marvel — both a role only she could have pulled off and a reminder of just how much she’s capable of. (Giamatti, it’s worth noting, is also tremendous in the film, and those of us still wishing he’d won for The Holdovers will be all over that campaign, too.)
Every other potential best actress contender in Toronto was in Moore’s shadow, but I heard good things from many people about Rosalind Eleazar in Misty Green, Carrie Coon in The Liberation, Sarah Paulson in Closing Night (still without a distributor), and of course Inde Navarrette in Obsession, whose photo with Hudson Williams following the anniversary screening of her horror hit was the publicity coup of the fest.
5. Amazon MGM’s Big Bets Pay Out
Every conversation speculating about the TIFF People’s Choice Award — a famous harbinger of Oscar success — inevitably begins with I Play Rocky, which had a thrilling premiere on Saturday night. I didn’t see it, but I’ve heard plenty from Chris about how much fun he had watching the Rocky origin story — from Anthony Ippolito’s impressive lead performance as Sylvester Stallone, to a finale that, like Rocky itself, leaves a crowd cheering.
I Play Rocky, coming to theaters in November, was Amazon MGM’s biggest TIFF hit by far, but there was also plenty of great word of mouth for the Mahershala Ali-led Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and the romantic drama Love of Your Life. I’m hopeful that next year more major studios will follow Amazon MGM’s lead and debut more of their future crowdpleasers in front of some of the best crowds in the world.
6. Slow Sales, Some Optimism
As of this writing, there aren’t many major sales to report from TIFF, despite the first annual TIFF Market, which in theory should have made it easier to get business done on the ground. (I didn’t spend a ton of time around the Market at the Toronto Convention Centre and didn’t get a good read on its success — so if you did, please write in and let me know your thoughts!)
But splashy sales were never all that common during the festival, even in more boom times for indie film — Focus didn’t close the rights for Obsession last year until a full month after its TIFF Midnight madness premiere. One horror sale is already worth noting this year: Blumhouse and Universal picked up the low-budget horror effort River from IFC for $10 million. (Shoutout to my pal Sam Zimmerman, who loves horror more than anyone I know and is leading indie acquisitions like this one at Blumhouse.)
I’m staying optimistic that a few favorite titles from TIFF will have a home soon, particularly Kris Rey’s Trash Mountain, a heartfelt coming-home dramedy starring comedian Caleb Hearon. I also assume a bright future for Lauren Miller Rogen’s Babies, featuring a raft of well-known actors and a funny, relatable story of an early midlife crisis. (Roadside Attractions and Vertical Entertainment picked that up ahead of TIFF, with an eye toward a 2027 release.) So hey, if you’re a distributor considering picking up Trash Mountain or just want to know more about Babies, why not revisit the interviews from our studio, see how smart these people are, and call their agents?
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