TIFF @ 50: Our Best, Worst, Funniest, Most Poignant… (Pick an Adjective) Memories

By Original-Cin Staff

The time Sean Penn got charged for smoking at a press conference… that bash for the Tommy Chong documentary where attendees were handed laced brownies at the door… that party where Jack Nicholson said, “Wrong verb, honey,” when asked to dance… Piers Handling’s annual skinny dip at Grenadier Park…

OK, we made that last one up.

But as the Toronto International Film Festival faces its 50th, Original-Cin remembers. Add up all the TIFFs our writers have covered, and you’re looking at about 200 years of experiences. Yeah, I know that doesn’t add up, but you don’t read us for the math.

Herewith, some TIFF memories, from the people who were there.

Original-Cin’s Bonnie Laufer with Joel Schumacher

Jim Slotek

My first TIFF was in 1982, when it was grandiosely named Festival of Festivals. I was a young entertainment reporter at the Ottawa Citizen, and it was one of my first out-of-town assignments.

Being a Winnipeg boy, a highlight was interviewing my fellow North Ender Burton Cummings. A lowlight was reviewing Melanie, the movie he was in with Glynnis O’Connor (Ode to Billie Joe). But the real highlight came at the gala for Jean-Jacques Annaud’s early-hominid adventure Quest for Fire, a movie I loved and felt sure would win the Best Picture Oscar. (Hey, I was 24, what did I know? Gandhi would win it.).

I was with a then-girlfriend whose dad hated Pierre Trudeau. And there was the PM, sitting at a banquet table with no obvious security (although I’m sure they were there). “Wouldn’t it be funny,” I said, “if we got your dad an autograph?”

No one stopped us from going ahead. “Make it out to Andrey,” she said. “Andrey?” Trudeau replied as he began to write. “What sort of name is that?”

“Ukrainian,” she said.

He handed over the autograph and said sweetly, “He must hate me. All Ukrainians hate me.”

True, it was Soviet times, and the diaspora called him “chervonyi” (red). But that didn’t stop her dad from having the autograph framed and placed on his wall. “A celebrity is a celebrity,” he said.

Liz Braun

Every year during the film festival, Dusty Cohl used to host a dinner at the old Spadina Gardens restaurant. Cohl — one of the co-founders of TIFF and the Walk of Fame and so much else in this city — invited friends, fellow producers, festival honchos, leading critics such as Roger Ebert and Richard Corliss and various other cultural bright lights in the world of entertainment.

Usually at the table you’d find George and Gail Anthony, Lori McGoran, and music promoter Michael Cohl, Bill Ballard, maybe Helga Stephenson or Brian Linehan and other high-profile locals as well as actors, directors, and a motley crew of other creatives. The guest list changed every year.

The dinners operated during the heyday of entertainment media, pre-Kardashian, pre-influencers, pre-Instagram. It was exhilarating to be included in one of these gatherings. You felt part of a growing film community and it was magical. But then, everything involving Dusty Cohl was sort of magical. The last dinner happened in 2007, a few months before Dusty died. It was all a long time ago.

This is my 40th year covering the festival.

Thom Ernst

Only at TIFF do you find yourself with coffee in one hand, croissant in the other, bracing for Hostel — Eli Roth’s notorious journey into torture tourism. A Midnight Madness film, screened at 8:30 in the morning, in the biggest screening room the Varsity Cinema has to offer.

Lights dim. The movie begins. A few stragglers slip in, among them former Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes with Roth at his side, settling across the aisle from me. Onscreen, the carnage mounts. Predictably, a few patrons walk out. Roth looks bewildered, almost wounded that his carefully crafted bloodshed should be so underappreciated.

Then it happens. A scene so vicious and cruel that my body betrays me; I yelp loudly and leap from my seat. Roth’s head whips around to face me. His face ignites with enough glee to light up the entire theatre. He jabs a finger towards me while yelling:

“See! That guy! That guy gets it!”

And just like that, I’m TIFF’s accidental scream king — Roth’s proof of concept, his validation made flesh.

I only hope he didn’t read my review.

Karen Gordon

In 2000 I was covering TIFF as a freelancer for the local CBC morning radio show. Highly rated, but there’s a pecking order when it comes to interviews at TIFF, and radio is close to the bottom. Understandable when publicists have talent in for a short window with heavy demands on their time in an era where most newspapers had dedicated movie sections. I heard the word “No” a lot. But I’m stubborn.

At that Festival, Ang Lee’s gorgeous martial arts/love story Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon emerged as the buzz film. Everybody wanted to talk to Lee. So, when Lee got on my elevator with one of the local publicists, I discretely followed them to the publicist’s suite.

They walked him into their designated interview room, and closed the door, leaving him there alone. I asked if he was free. “No.”

It was 1 pm. They explained: He had one more interview to do, and then at 1:20 would be taken to the airport. But I pointed out, it was already after 1 pm, and the interviewer was nowhere in sight. So, I said, ‘How about if I just sit here quietly, and if the interviewer shows up, I’ll leave. But if not, I just need five minutes.’ I sat down. And waited with my eye on the clock. No one showed up. At 1:15, I said, ‘Can I have the rest of his time?’ And that’s how I ended up with an interview with the most desired director at TIFF.

Beyond the thrill of actually getting a yes and getting to talk to the director of such a fabulous movie, Lee was wonderful.

Coda: The missing interviewer showed up at 1:20pm. He’d been told his slot was 1 pm to 1:20 pm and misheard it as “Come at 1:20.” The poor guy had a meltdown. Lee, ever gracious and a mensch, invited him to hop in the car to do the interview on the way to the airport.

Moonlight from 2016

Kim Hughes

When it comes to talent interviews at TIFF, surprises invariably await. Case in point: In 2016, director Oliver Stone blabbed my ears purple for 24 uninterrupted minutes about Snowden, his film about the American whistleblower played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I think I was able to squeeze in two questions. But still. It was just him, me, and an iPhone, a rare and completely unexpected one-on-one.

Press conferences and round tables — where a bunch of writers literally sit around a table with a director or star, lobbing questions for a set time until everyone rotates to another table — are also wild cards. Some are fun and memorable, like Ralph Fiennes quipping about, of all things, his bloody Shakesperean epic Coriolanus in 2011. Some are dead uncomfortable, as in 2016 when a peevish Casey Affleck snapped at my colleague Liz Braun’s perfectly reasonable question about the Oscar potential of Manchester by the Sea. Which, ahem, won Affleck an Oscar.

Then there was the presser for Moonlight, coincidentally also in 2016. Members of the film’s cast as well as writer-director Barry Jenkins were steered into an oversized hotel room with a bunch of writers. The setting could not have been more loosey-goosey; no Oscar talk here as I recall. The film that would go on to capture Best Picture was perceived as an outlier. I firmly believe the genuine affection that group engendered for their film made Moonlight a smash. Everyone in that room became a cheerleader.

Chris Knight

When I mention interviews from TIFF, people want to know what so-and-so is like. The answer is usually: Tired. Jet-lagged, busy, over-caffeinated, underfed, dragged around by publicists and yammered at by — well, me.

But most are on their best behaviour. And some are downright charming. Here are a few.

George Clooney. In town in 2017 for Suburbicon, he worked a room full of press like a presidential candidate on the campaign trail. He had a moment for everyone, and he made each one personal. I was in awe, but I sensed it was real — you can’t act that nice without being at least a little nice. Just ask Tom Hanks.

Hope Davis. You won’t find my interview piece. I never wrote it. We had such a lovely, unfocused chat that I had nothing to write about. But what a great person to talk to!

Jake Gyllenhaal. Very smart. Very focused. Very approachable. I’ve had the honour twice. I’d make it three in a heartbeat.

Jessica Chastain. Talked to her first in 2011, when her career was exploding thanks to Take Shelter, The Help, The Debt and The Tree of Life. Professional but naturally warm. I once lobbed a question about female representation in moves to her at Cannes, and her trenchant answer was the entertainment news of the day. It made my month.

Patrick Stewart. Never meet your heroes? I’ve met Captain Picard, and he did not disappoint. I was so chuffed after that I strode into the elevator at the Intercontinental Hotel, spun on my heel, and demanded, “Bridge.” (And then pressed “Lobby.”)

Harrison Ford. Sigourney Weaver. Carrie-Anne Moss. This sounds like name-dropping, but there’s a point. Deckard. Ripley. Trinity. I was terrified of each. They were marvellous.

Liam Lacey

“I grieve for my unused work,” Marlon Brando told Richard Harris, who told it to me — and I, too, understand what it means to mourn work that never saw the light of day.

The above sentence is the kind of thing my Irish father would have mockingly called “washing your shirt in the same bucket.” The expression is used to ridicule someone who is trying to claim prestige through some remote association with greatness.

In my case, my “unused work” was a couple of my favourite TIFF interviews which were never published. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t locate any evidence of my 1988 interview with Israel’s “First Lady of the theatre” Gila Almagor, a novelist and much-awarded actress.

The interview was for the Eli Cohen film, The Summer of Aviya (also known as Summer of Aviya or Aviya’s Summer) based on Almagor’s autobiographical novel, about a young girl in Israel in 1951, whose mother is a mentally unstable Holocaust survivor. The mother, played by Almagor, vacillates between cruel tough love and over-protective mistreatment of her daughter.

The film won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and has subsequently earned a reputation as a classic of 1980s Israeli film. As with all my favourite interviews, the interview went deep fast. Almagor was passionate about her story and its personal and political meaning.

I recall her saying that “the entire nation of Israel suffers from survivor syndrome.” But I can’t prove she said that because I have no record of the interview and apparently, I never wrote the article. Recently, I discovered that the film The Summer of Aviya wasn’t released in Canada until the success of its 1995 sequel, Under the Domin Tree. In my 1996 four-star review of The Summer of Aviya, I referred briefly to the previous interview but, eight years later, I no longer had a recording or notes.

My other lost interview was with the aforementioned Richard Harris, a onetime icon of the British New Wave, co-star of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, who had late-career success in Gladiator and the first two Harry Potter movies.

My interview took place on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. When I left home around 9 am that morning, I heard the news that a passenger plane had hit the World Trade Centre which I thought was a terrible freak accident. I met Harris at 9:30 in the coffee shop of the Intercontinental Hotel on Bloor Street. He was promoting a contemporary British gangster film called My Kingdom, based on King Lear. Tall and gaunt, with pale blue eyes and a mane of white hair in a ponytail, he was dressed in a trench coat and tennis shoes and, judging by the gravel of his voice, was hungover from a party he attended the night before.

Though it was nippy outside, Harris asked if we could sit outside so he could smoke. After his first drag, he insisted I give my honest opinion of the film without any flattery. I told him I didn’t think it worked. He agreed. Then he asked me if I had heard about the second airplane and it took me a minute to realize this wasn’t some kind of bad joke.

“I think it would be better to die of drink in a room over a pub in Ireland than in a plane with a bunch of strangers,” he said.

My Kingdom never opened in Canada and my interview with Richard Harris never ran. I did keep the recording and managed to use some of the interview in an appreciation of his legacy I wrote 13 months later, when Harris died of cancer at 72.

On that chilly morning, the interview reflected our shared anxiety about the state of the world and, possibly, a shared Irish addiction to the consolation of conversation. Harris spoke of his desire “to do work that won’t make me feel ashamed; I’m not interested in the opinion on my tombstone. Won’t be around to see it.”

He spoke with reverence about Marlon Brando, who was six years his senior, and at the time, was still alive. Harris had acted with Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) but the two had clashed, which Harris blamed on his youthful arrogance. Years later, he said, he ended up in the same hotel as Brando and this time, the two hit it off.

Brando had seen Harris in Camelot on television and greatly admired his singing. They made a deal: Brando agreed to answer questions about acting if Harris would sing to him. They spoke and sang together through the night.

“He talked a lot about On the Waterfront and how disappointed he was in it, and I said, ‘What are you talking about? It’s one of the greatest performances in film history.’ And he said, ‘I just grieve for all my work that wasn’t used in the film.’ And he was right, you know. You do grieve for what doesn’t get seen.”

Bonnie Laufer

I am a TIFF veteran. My very first TIFF was in 1987 when I was an Entertainment Assistant at Global Television. I have such fond memories of being a lackey that year, but the highlight was attending the junket for The Princess Bride (which to this day remains one of my all-time favourite films). Meeting Rob Reiner and the cast, including Billy Crystal, was a dream come true for this entertainment junkie just starting out her career.

Pushing ahead a few years, I became the Entertainment Producer at Global Television heading up the TIFF coverage for the network. So many memorable interviews and events but one of my absolute fondest memories was getting to chat with veteran filmmaker Joel Schumacher for his film, Phonebooth starring Colin Farrell.

I was only supposed to have a 10-minute interview, but his publicist completely forgot about us and our chat ended up lasting over an hour. We dove into his career and personal life. We really hit it off and developed a personal connection. For years to follow, I was always at the top of Schumacher’s list for interviews and never missed an opportunity to chat with him. He was one of a kind!