The Paul Wells Show - TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey on the future of movies

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

What is the future of sitting in the dark with strangers? The film industry has had to face major existential questions lately, between disruptions from COVID and the rise of streaming. Cameron Bailey, CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival, joins Paul to talk about it. He also talks about how TIFF became the world-class institution that it is, his path from film critic to CEO, and casting his first ballot for the Oscars.

Is COVID going to be the death of cinema? Cameron Bailey doesn't think so. People were terrified that the arrival of sound would mean the end of cinema, that the arrival of colour would mean the end of cinema, that TV would kill cinema, streaming would kill cinema. None of it is going to kill cinema. Coming up, it's Oscar week, so I've got the CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival, Cameron Bailey, on the future of leaving the house to go sit in a dark room. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show.

Wells Show. There's a paradox at the heart of moviegoing. You're out in public, but you're enjoying a very personal experience. There are strangers all around you, but each of you is focused on the person on the screen. It's only natural to wonder whether people will ever fall out of love with that odd bargain. All the more so since COVID made us all nervous about going out in public. These are interesting questions for you and me, but for Cameron Bailey, they're pressing and persistent. Bailey is the CEO of TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the world's largest festivals with a year-round presence on King Street in Toronto. TIFF made $45 million in revenue in 2019. Then COVID did to them what it did to all of us. And now the whole industry is grappling with life after COVID, not just as a business,

but as a creative community. TIFF is both of those things. So these questions are Cameron Bailey's life these days. His thoughts are useful for the rest of us because the movies have always held a mirror up to the way we live. I first met Cameron Bailey a million years ago when we were both undergraduates at the University of Western Ontario, writing for the Gazette, the student paper. He was a great writer and a snappy dresser on a budget. He loved the movies even then. That much hasn't changed. I spoke to Cameron Bailey at the University of Toronto's Munk School. Cameron Bailey, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Paul. It's really good to be here and to have this chance to talk.

So how did you feel around March 12th, 15th, 2020, when suddenly we weren't allowed to be together anymore for anything? I will never forget it. I'm sure like all of us, our lives completely changed. You know, when the festival's not on, we have a building called Tiff Bell Lightbox at King and John Streets in Toronto, and we're running movies all year round. We were running movies when we found out that we could no longer run movies and we would have to close our doors. And we had a lot of meetings and conversations about when should we do it? Should we do it? How should we do it? What happens to our staff? At that point, we were employing about 150 full-time staffers. We didn't know how long it would be. I think like a lot of us, we thought, we'll close for a couple of weeks, see how it goes, and then we'll open back up.

And of course, 18 months later is when we were able to open back up. So it changed everything. In the meantime, we still had a festival to plan. We made it a primarily virtual festival. We discovered drive-ins, that they're still a thing, that you can actually put on a drive-in and people, at least as a novelty, will go and watch a movie from their car. We had to invent our own digital streaming platform in about two months time. So we did that and somehow we were able to put on the festival. And then, you know, we had to figure out everything, every step of the way.

For a lot of large organizations, especially organizations that have a social mandate, the order of operations in those early days was make sure staff is safe, figure out how you're going to meet payroll or whether you are dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, existential dread. Like then you start to ask the sort of big universal questions like, are people just going to stop gathering? Yes. Before we did all that, we had to figure out how to work Zoom. If you'll remember, that was still a thing where we had to figure out how to get online. I remember days of six hours, seven hours of just being on Zoom constantly with different groups of people trying to figure this stuff out. We met a lot with government representatives,

municipal, provincial, federal level in Canada. We met with our own staff, our leadership, the full staff, our board members, everybody we could talk to to try to figure out how to survive. That meant trying to secure as much of our private sponsorship as we could through our corporate partners, what to do with the box office that we knew was not going to happen that year, how to respond to that gap. And then like everybody, like a lot of cultural organizations, we started talking more to government than we had ever talked to government before, because that was where the support

was coming from for survival and then eventually for recovery as well. And then fast forward to this past September, you had kind of the first back for real full scale festival since the lockdown began. Are you entirely reassured now? You know, when Taylor Swift got off her plane in Toronto, yes, that was reassuring for sure. It was a festival that had to be defined by whether people would come back. And by people, I mean our audience, first of all, because many people had gotten used to doing other things. There's so many ways to watch movies. There's way more movies and TV shows than any of us will ever be able to watch.

way more movies and TV shows than any of us will ever be able to watch. And we had to understand whether people would still value seeing a movie first at its premiere and seeing it with the artists who made the movie. Turns out they did. Turns out people also just wanted to gather in Toronto. You know, we'd had so many lockdowns and openings up again and then further lockdowns that I think the fact that we were inviting people to come together in large numbers for those who were ready for that, they flocked to it. You know, we closed down King Street in the heart of the festival for four days

of the festival, we had 400,000 people come through for that, which was remarkable. So when the audience came back, when the filmmakers came back, and to have someone like Steven Spielberg at our festival premiering his film, that was a massive deal. That had never happened in our history. we worked very hard on it we went out and we you know we went and met with people in New York and LA and London and Paris and you know all the major centers where movies are made and we invited them back and we made a case for it and they came why did all those people start coming to TIFF in the first place there's a million film festivals around the world I spent the 90s working at the Montreal Gazette and every year was we were trying to resuscitate some sort of rivalry between Montreal's film festival and Toronto's,

and Montreal just took one thumping after another. This is about the time that you become involved with the Toronto Festival. What's the secret sauce? So we started in 1976, and the Toronto and Montreal Film Festival started within one year of each other, and for a long time the Montreal Festival was the cooler, sexier festival. There's no getting around that. It was in Montreal, first of all.

But then also a lot of the European filmmakers in particular were very used to going to a French style festival. And so they modeled themselves in part on Cannes. They were very formal and fancy. And our festival in Toronto was almost the opposite of that. We had three very canny, kind of sly like a fox founders, Bill Marshall, Dusty Cole, and Hank Vander Kolk, who used to hang out at the Cannes Film Festival. And they thought, this is nice. We like hanging out on the beach, but why are you in tuxedos? You're at a film

festival, you're watching movies. So they wanted to bring some of the excitement of the Cannes Film Festival, but to make it Toronto, to make it Canadian. And for them, that meant much more informal. It meant it had to be driven by the audience and not by the kind of high priests of cinema, the ones who decide what's good and what's not filmmaking. And it had to be fun. And so that was the Toronto Festival compared to the Montreal Festival and then at a certain point you there's a lot of kind of just in the trench work you have to do to secure the films and the film people that you want at your festival and that meant getting anointed by people like Roger Ebert the great film critic who started coming to our festival in the early 1980s and loved it and wrote at one point to his massive following that this was the best film

festival in the world. We did tributes to people like Warren Beatty and Martin Scorsese, and they also brought their prominent friends along. And it was really just the test of you can come here, you can hang out. And this was also just a few years before the Sundance Festival started with a similar kind of informal laid-back vibe. It turned out there were fancy, famous people who liked that. And that's, I think, what made us grow compared to some other festivals. Back up a little further, and you were getting ready for all of this as a film student at University of Western Ontario.

And I had this whole shtick prepared where I was going to claim to have made you what you are today. Go ahead, we can still do that. I actually met Cameron probably in about 1986. You were writing reviews. You had been more active for the student paper earlier, but you were still writing the odd review.

And I was stuck as one of the two entertainment editors trying to polish your copy. And it was like camera ready, ready letter perfect that's very kind jeff brooke the other editor and i would look at each other and say i guess we could change a comma just so we could feel like we're worth it um what what did you think you were going to western to do and what did you discover at western well you'll like this i thought i was going to western to learn how to be a journalist. I thought that would be a great career. I loved reading. I loved writing. I loved the written word. And I edited my high school paper, actually, Thornhill Secondary

School newspaper. And then I went to Western. And shortly after I landed there, I was actually studying English literature. I went into the offices of the Gazette and I said, I'd love to write. I said, I used to edit my high school paper. They were very impressed with that. Not really. And so I started reviewing music, first of all, bands that used to play in London, Ontario. And then I started reviewing theater, got to go to the Stratford Festival and review plays there. And then eventually I took a film course, which was on contemporary cinema at Western, which was just an elective, an option. But it just blew my mind open. Started with Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, went everywhere but Hollywood. Movies I'd never even imagined. European cinema, Asian cinema, Latin American,

African cinema from the rest of the world. That turned me on to movies and I started writing about movies for the Gazette then. There's a still from one of those films that covers a wall of your office. That's right. This is the very first African feature film. It's called La Noire Deux or Black Girl

by Ousmane Sembène from Senegal. And he cast this beautiful woman who was a seamstress, not a professional actor at all. Her name was Imbissine Thérèse Diop. He cast her and it became a classic film. It's a film about colonialism, about a woman from Senegal who goes to France to work as a maid and has a disastrous series of encounters there. But it's just a magnificent film. And it's an inspiration to me, that image from it every day. About a decade later, you started the Planet Africa series at TIFF. So even then, even after several years of learning and studying, you were essentially discovering African cinema as you

were presenting it, I suspect. I was in a way i'm i'm thankful to tiff because tiff was what allowed me to go to africa for the very first time i went to burkina faso there's a very prominent african film festival called fespaco there and i went in 1991 a year after i'd started working at tiff and i had convinced my boss at the time, Piers Handling, to go with me, which was amazing. So we flew off to Ouagadougou and we landed and you could just feel the wall of hot, dry air hit you as you land. And just the red dust hanging in the air. It was just a beautiful place to be on the edge of the Sahel Desert. And everybody in the world who was interested in African cinema, making it, writing about it, programming it, they were all there. And I met some of my real heroes and heroines.

I got to learn about African cinema. And that eventually is what led to the creation of the Planet Africa section at the Toronto Film Festival in 1995. So it took about four years to build that. So it took about four years to build that. And the idea was always that it was going to be films from the continent of Africa, but also from the African diaspora and bring those things together as a way of generating, to come back to what we're all about at TIFF, an audience around those films. Another bit of background. A few years after that, we were trying to figure out who to hire for the new newspaper

that would become the National Post. And I said, there's this guy, Cameron Bailey, he can write like a dream. And he runs the African film component at TIFF. And the new editor of the Post, Ken White, cut me off right there. And he said, I don't need an African film curator. How is he with Bruce Willis? Well, I'll tell you. Yeah. I auditioned to write for Now Magazine, the alternative weekly that used to exist in Toronto, by going out to review the first Die Hard. So I'm actually all right with Bruce Willis. Did you like it? I did like it. And I still like it. And I watched it last month because we watch it every Christmas.

It's our most fond tradition. Now, you grew up outside Canada. You're London and then Barbados, and then you had moved here by high school. That's right. What was that adjustment like? And how did Canadians strike you when you first moved here? It's funny you put it that way, because they would strike me with their fists sometimes. And I joke because, you know, what else can you do? But I had a pretty hard landing, I would say. I was born in England. My parents were both from Barbados. They met and married there.

My sister and I were born in England. And that was part of the great post-war migration where England was rebuilding after the war and sent the call out to its colonies, former colonies, to say, come to the UK and help us rebuild. So my parents went there, my sister and I were born there. And it turned out that the British government maybe didn't tell its own people because the people were not terribly welcoming in Britain. Eventually, we left because just everyday racism was pretty bad. And we came here and it was in the 70s where there was a similar great wave of migration

from the Caribbean, from South Asia and other parts of the world that hadn't traditionally sent a lot of migrants to Canada. And so, you know, I'd be in a classroom where I was the only black student, hard to imagine in Toronto of today, but that was very much the case then. There was casual name calling and fights in the schoolyard and all those kinds of things that happened at the time. But I guess the upside of it was in Barbados, and this is something that I think my teachers didn't understand at the time, my education up to that point was advanced beyond the typical public school education here in Canada. So based on the British system, it was very rigorous, you know, a little bit rote sometimes in terms of you have to read this,

memorize it, you know, repeat it back, learn your times tables up to 12 by the time you're, I don't know, six years old or something like that. And so I was good in school. I was a good student. And that really helped because, you know, I loved reading. I loved doing well in school. And that was what I just kept my eye on the whole time. To some extent, you often found yourself being the first black guy, the only black guy in the settings that you were in. I read one place that you went to a press screening of Spike Lee's movie, Do the Right Thing, and you were the only black guy writing about a movie

that has a substantial, well, it's substantially about race. Yeah. How did that feel? Well, you know, at the time, it's substantially about race. How did that feel? Well, you know, at the time, it's just the water you're swimming in. And so I wrote my review based on my experiences. And I read many other reviews. And there were reviews at the time, Do the Right Thing came out in 1989. And there were reviews that said this was going to cause riots in the streets. You may remember that. And there was a kind of alarm that came out of the critical response because the critics were mostly, you know, they saw themselves

in Sal, the pizzeria owner, rather than in the rest of the characters in the movie, right? And so they were a bit panicked by it. Experiences like that helped me to understand that perspectives vary so much and they really matter. And it's not like one perspective is necessarily more valid than the other, but understanding that there are multiple perspectives is really what really my entire sort of cultural life and career has been about learning and trying to communicate more. communicate more. The only dangerous thing I think is when people don't understand that there are perspectives beyond their own, which I think maybe holds true for our political landscape these days as well. I do remember at the time thinking, well, damn it, I'm just going to throw caution to the wind. I'm going to go see, do the right thing. Taking your life in your hands.

And, you know, and then go go get pizza it was what it was you know yes um for part of this period you were writing for now and other outlets while you were making was that something that was hard to uh navigate that you were essentially helping to build this cultural institution while you were also operating as a critic yeah um you know i helping to build this cultural institution while you were also operating as a critic? Yeah, I tried to create a sort of dividing line. So I wouldn't obviously cover the Toronto Film Festival as a critic while I was programming for it.

There were certain times of year that were easy to work with because the festival programming season really starts in the spring. So up until the spring, I could be busy working as a critic and then pause that or slow it down and then move on to the festival work. As all this was happening, as you're getting more and more involved with TIFF, did you think that at some point you might become the CEO? Never, I think is the answer. But what I will say is I have a good friend who's a filmmaker. His name is Clement Virgo. He has a new film called Brother, which we premiered at our festival

and I think is coming out shortly. And we kind of came up together. We met a long time ago when we were very young, and we would go out and just chat about our lives and the industry and different things. And at a certain point, he asked me, have you ever thought about running this when the time is right and the current leaders move on? And to be honest, I never had. I'm not someone

with a grand plan. I don't really work that way. And for some reason, my imagination hadn't allowed me to do that. And when Clement asked me that, that was the first time I ever thought about it. But then once he had done that and planted that seed, it was always there. And it wasn't like I began to work towards that. It was more that I saw it as an opportunity. And what I will say is we both entered a work world in, let's say, the late 80s, early 90s that was very different than today. There were so many different places you could write. Journalism just worked so differently. Social media wasn't a thing.

The internet was barely a thing. And, you know, I freelanced for 19 years. I never had a steady job for 19 years of my first 19 years of my career, which is kind of amazing to think now. But a lot of people are in that sort of semi-precarious landscape more and more, it seems. I'm glad that I was able to step out of that. But I remember when I got the job first as co-director of the film festival in 2008, I walked into the office in January around this time that many years ago and there was an office and there was a desk and there was a phone on the desk we don't have those anymore but there was a phone on the desk and I sat down and it's if any of you've watched Catch Me If You Can when Leonardo DiCaprio and towards the end of the movie is working for the FBI and he goes in and he sits down at his

desk and he looks around like do I have to come here every day? That's what I felt like because I'd never had that life before. I used to write in coffee shops. My hunch is that as CEO, you have to worry much more about funding and logistics. And actually, there's a capsule biography that says that you're responsible for the festival's strategic direction. What is the festival's strategic direction, Mr. CEO? I mean, look, I can rattle it off if you want our strat plans bullet points, but maybe we'll save that for another time.

Okay. But yeah, my role now has to do with setting a direction for the ship. And I don't do a lot of the things that I used to do hands-on. We have other members of the team who do that, but people need to know where we're going. We are in year two of a three-year strategic plan, which was formed in the middle of the pandemic. And it wasn't just the pandemic that changed how we thought about what TIFF does and what TIFF is. It was also things like audience behavior that also changed as a result of the pandemic. All of us at home on our couches or, you know, in our beds watching stuff on our laptops and on our TV screens.

And the comfort that we got out of that and also the rise of social media and sharing opinions about movies and TV shows on our phones, that's a different environment to put on a film festival in or to try to raise awareness about a, you know, arthouse movie that doesn't have a big promotional budget. So we had to think about what we do differently. And what I really learned, I can't say learn, but what sunk in more than ever during the pandemic was that if we don't have people gathering together, if we're not encouraging that, then we don't have a purpose, really. That's what we do. Because something different happens when you watch films or take in music or any art form together. When you gather together as human beings, because we are so social, something changes.

The emotions get amplified when you're watching a movie together, especially because movies are so great because they're enormous, right? They're bigger than you are. And your main character's heads are 30 feet tall and their emotions are bigger. main characters' heads are 30 feet tall and their emotions are bigger and movies are structured to shape your emotional reaction. And they understand that they're doing that for an audience, not for an individual viewer necessarily. And we learned that when people aren't gathering together, when they're watching movies by themselves, they can be great movies, but the reaction is different. When we were able to bring people back together again this year, we found that we all missed it. It wasn't just us who put on this festival. It was the people who love movies missed watching movies together as well.

So put that to choices. Does that mean you're going to throttle down your streaming offer over time? Were you reading my email, Paul? Because we were having this debate, no decisions, but we were having this debate just today because we have some of our team at the Sundance Film Festival. And they're also trying to figure out, is hybrid still a thing? Do we still want to do that? The Sundance Film Festival is now run by my former colleague, Joanna Vesent, who was, we were co-heads for almost three years here at TIFF during the pandemic. And we've had these conversations over and over and over again. What is the relative value of that in-person gathering versus the value of the access and

the reach you have by saying everybody across Canada, everybody across the US can watch these movies we're selecting? everybody across the US can watch these movies we're selecting. I still think that there's something unique and irreplaceable about the in-person experience and the whole experience, not just sitting in the movie theater together and feeling something, but going out of your house and lining up with other people who've made the same choice as you, and then having that shared experience, and then having the shared reaction afterwards. You know, that buzz when you come out of a film that you've just seen together

and everybody's reacting and sort of talking about their favorite moments and that sort of stuff. You miss all of that. It all falls away and it's just something that you have as opposed to something you shared with other people. And so I still think that should be what we focus on

and that's what I'm trying to drive our strategy towards. After the break, Cameron Bailey will talk about casting his first ballot for the Oscars. I want to take a moment to thank all of our partners. The University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the National Arts Centre, our founding sponsor, TELUS, our title sponsor, Compass Rose, and our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics. So there's the decisions you make, and then there's the environment within which you operate, which is, to a great extent, the North American cinematic and media landscape.

Whose features include? A debate between streaming and the full cinematic experience. It includes these gigantic blockbusters, and then a large gap gap and then everything else. Do you think that there can still be a North American cinema or is it going to be a kind of a bifurcated experience over time? I think it's going to keep changing, which has been its nature ever since cinema began. You know, people were terrified that the arrival of sound would mean the end of cinema,

that the arrival of color would mean the end of cinema, that TV would kill cinema, VHS would kill cinema, DVDs would kill cinema, streaming would kill cinema. None of it is going to kill cinema. You know, that will not happen. Cinema will live, because it's more than just the delivery system. It's an art form. It's an art form. It's an art form that exists in time and with movement and color and sound and all of those

things that artists will always have as their palette to work with. So I'm not afraid of that. But what can happen in that constant evolution is that choices can narrow. But we've seen that for decades already. And there is, I think, still a very important role for us at TIFF to play in saying, yeah, there's an amazing Polish director who made a movie about a donkey. And it's one of the best movies in the year, and you should see it. And it is not going to be in your local multiplex ever, but it's amazing. It's called EO, and it's been in the Oscar conversation. And it is a terrific film that

we had at the festival. We played at TIFF Bell Lightbox. And that's kind of why we're there, to keep reminding people of those options. why we're there to keep reminding people of those options. Those options become quite evident in the latest Oscar nominations. And you have more of a stake in that than you had before, because this was your first year as a voting member of the Academy. That's right. Yes. Who'd you vote for?

I think they kick you out for saying that, Paul. I can't do that. No one listens to this. What I will tell you, though, what I will tell you is I have my favorites like every other voting member of any awards body does. But there are also some things that I'm just really glad to see. The Academy is the same organization that people sometimes deride as being hidebound that voted for Chloe Zhao's film Nomadland recently and voted for Parasite, the Bong Joon-ho film recently. And that's exciting to me.

They've expanded their membership. There's a much wider, I think, more interesting range of movies that are available for voters to respond to. And I'm always looking up for those kind of films as well. I will say I love The Fablemans, so I'm never going to knock that movie. And I know that that's one of the rare times that I cried in a film in years, but it's the diversity of options that I'm interested in. And that's what I'm glad to see the Academy doing more of. What was it about The Fablemans? Was it the way Spielberg transmits his excitement for the craft?

But there's also the story of the kid who is really not welcomed at school. I mean, which part of it was? It was all of it. But I think if I have to go to the heart of it, when I was growing up, I didn't know I loved movies. Movies were something I just absorbed unconsciously like probably a lot of kids. I didn't get to go out to the movie theater very often and watch movies on TV. But what I remember from going to movies as a kid, the only thing I remember is watching Jaws at a drive-in and being scared out of my mind.

And then going to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind when it opened, and then going back. I went to see it five times. And there was something about Spielberg's movies in particular that just hit me. And the only other filmmaker who had that impact on me that strongly was Jean-Luc Godard. And they're polar opposites, and Godard was a notorious hater of Spielberg. But somehow that reflects who I am, I guess. And so watching The Fablemans was about understanding what fed this young Steven Spielberg that allowed him to create these movies that could just reach into people's psyches and souls and touch them. And he does it with craft. And what was great about that movie is that you see that

you know something that seems intangible and amorphous you don't know why you're having this effect and why are you suddenly crying in the color purple or you know being scared out of your mind when a fake dinosaur is threatening a human being you know it's all fake and and it's his technique that creates those massive and global emotional impacts. And that was what I loved watching the movie. You see that. When I was still at Western and I was writing a bit about this and I was beginning to realize that this stuff was actually important to me, I tried to sort of categorize what was it that drew me to a movie. And the first draft of that thesis was that I love movies by people who love movies.

I love movies by people who you can see on the screen that they're just in love with what they're doing. And we still see a lot of examples of that. I don't know how your world works. Have you talked to Sarah Pauly since Tuesday? Not since Tuesday, no. Sarah Pauly is somebody that I have known for a long time. We showed her movie at the festival. We've sat down doing things like this on stage together and talked about her work. And if you've read her book, Run Towards the Danger, you'll know that she hates doing this kind of thing. But somehow she was able to. I've been trying to get her, so that's really discouraging.

I'm sorry. She has terrible stage fright, I think, still, and does not like doing this kind of thing at all. And it's all in her book. But we sent her a gift when she began doing so well in awards season. She was at the Golden Globes and many other places as well. And she has this great kind of acerbic sense of humor and wrote back some ridiculous line in response, which was nice. So I'm just going to be cheering from the sidelines for her over the next while, but it's just great to see.

I just think she should have been nominated for Best Director as well, which I think was a shame. But Best Picture is not too shabby. And she's been remarkably sportsmanlike. She hasn't said a word in public about that. That's right. But I think a lot of people feel the same way. Yeah, completely.

Is it possible to have a reasonable opinion as between Avatar, Elvis, and a German language version of All Quiet on the Western Front? Is it possible to say, well, that one's better? I mean, the great thing is they're all movies, right? And movies can do so many different things. And this year's crop shows you that. But they're not trying to do the same thing at all, right? I mean, what James Cameron is trying to do is very different than what Sarah Pauly is trying to do. I can't think of movies that are more different. It's nice that, you know, they both grew up here

in this country. So that maybe tells you something about this place too. But, you know, it'll be for people to decide. And, you know, it's a reflection maybe of just the differences of opinion and taste within the academy as well. The academy is always trying to, and I speak about it like it's a, you know, an organization that I know thoroughly, I don't. But just from observation, they want to reflect the ambition of the art form and the greatest things that cinema can do. But at the same time, they want to recognize that cinema is a popular medium. And movies that make a gazillion dollars are important because they make a gazillion dollars. They're tapping into something that must be recognized as well. And understanding how to straddle that divide is what the Oscars seem to be doing every year.

It's also almost forever been part of what TIFF tries to do. And you get criticized from time to time for letting any Hollywood glitter fly in and host a party. How do you respond to that kind of dig? Well, you know, we have no control over the parties. So there's that. There's a lot of that that happens that people think that I have some kind of golden key to. No. But when it comes to the film selection, I can't tell you how many big star Hollywood movies we say no to every single year, because it has a big name and it doesn't mean it's worth presenting to our audience and our programming team knows that. But we are next door to the biggest, most dominant still film industry in the world. That industry is very focused on our festival because it's still a great place to launch movies.

And there's some unique things that are important that we don't talk about a lot, but are very clear. So unlike some of the other big festivals, we're an audience-driven festival. And it's why someone like Steven Spielberg wants to come to Toronto because the audience reaction is very important to him. He could have gone to a festival where he's judged by seven members of an international jury. Not as interesting for someone like Steven Spielberg, right? He wants to know how the audience reacts. It turned out that his film won the audience award at our festival, People's Choice Award last year. In addition to just that audience

component, we've always got to make sure that there's an international range of films. We have films from roughly 140 different countries every year, from all over the world. Everything from first time short films to, you know, big budget blockbusters and keeping that in the mix is really important. Do you ever rewatch films anymore? Yeah, I do, actually. Do you ever microwave up like a jug of popcorn and watch The Hangover? You know, The Hangover is not really my jam, I will say, but there's some others that I watch.

There's some films that I feel are kind of like just vibe films or mood films. Everyone's got their own. Mine might be as strange as yours but um hitchcock's vertigo is one of those for me because it's such a kind of visual and music driven film the dialogue doesn't matter that much and you can just put it on and just let it float over you can't tell you how many times i've seen that wong kar wise films in the mood for love and chunking express or like that for me they're more just like a space you want to be in, a place you want to hang out. And then there's some traditional ones like, you know, around the

holiday season. Yeah, we watch Die Hard and we watch some other movies as well. And those are fun. And also sometimes I learn a lot by watching a movie again because you watch it so differently the second time. You've got at least one teenager. One 13-year-old, that's right. Is it hard not to dump all your movie stuff on him when he's watching a movie? Well, now that he's 13, I can no longer do that. But we started pretty early. I'd say when he was around four, five years old,

we watched a lot of movies. And I'm glad that I had his attention at that age because I was able to show him silent movies, Buster Keaton and Chaplin and others, to show him the Universal Pictures horror movies from the 1930s and 40s. So Creature from the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein and those movies, which are, you know, to a contemporary 21st century eye can look a little stilted and they're in black and white and that kind of thing. But they still genuinely work. Emotionally, they work on a little kid to see Frankenstein and the little girl at the edge of the lake. You know, that's still a very powerful scene. So we watch all kinds of stuff. I have a whole letterboxed where it's private, where I've kind of gone through and logged all of the films that we watched together and I wanted him to see the films that matter to me but also to understand what cinema can do so we watched you know the Miyazaki animated masterpieces when he was quite young and went

through most of them we watched um seven up that documentary oh yeah when he was seven probably a bad idea it was kind of a little too cute on my part When he was seven. Probably a bad idea. It was kind of a little too cute on my part. But it was interesting to watch a seven-year-old watch other seven-year-olds. I love doing that kind of thing. Now, every now and then, when I get him in the right mood,

he's ready to watch something that's not just what he wants to watch, you know? And I hope we keep that through his whole life. You started writing at the Stratford Festival many, many years ago. The current artistic director of Stratford, Anthony Cimolino, makes me marvel every year because he can announce what the theme of the festival is. This year it's about how we live together,

or it's about conflict. What's the theme of next year's TIFF? It's about whatever Anthony's theme is. I have no idea. And it's funny because I also get asked that question all the time. And it's a little bit of a bogus question, to be honest, because we don't make the films. We just choose films and we certainly don't choose them for their theme.

That would be a crazy way to put a festival together. You choose them because they're great films that you fall in love with and you think your audience will too and so then you know any kind of theme gets imposed on that afterwards right you look at a bunch of films and there we saw a lot of films this year that are by filmmakers who are reflecting on the art and industry of cinema, right? The Fablemans or Empire of Light or Bardo or many other films that are semi-autobiographical. Function of the pandemic? Maybe.

Who knows? They just happen to all come out at this time. We had Belfast last year as well, or year before last, and similar kind of idea. The creation of an artist, but that's a timeless subject matter for an artist. You know, the Bildungsroman from my old English lit days, all of that is still present in cinema.

So to call it a theme is a bit of a cop-out, honestly. Okay. Well, let's leave it on that ambiguous note then. It's been a real kick catching up with you. I remember those days at Western when you were better dressed than the rest of us. I just wore Salvation Army suits then. Yeah, but we were a bit of a pushover as a jury. Okay.

And I'm glad things have worked out so well for you. Thank you. And for you too, Paul. Thanks for taking the time. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica

in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics.

Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hayley Choi. Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriel. Stuart Cox is the president of Antica. Remember, the Academy Awards are this Sunday. Here's hoping nobody gets slugged. If you're enjoying this show, spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday. you