As the Toronto International Film Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, there may be no two people better suited to talk about this milestone than Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, the co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics who have spent decades making the annual trek to Canada to screen films that include (but certainly aren’t limited to) Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Whiplash and last year’s best international feature Oscar winner, I’m Still Here.
Ahead of this year’s festival — where the distributor is screening Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, the historical drama Nuremberg and Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great — Bernard and Barker discuss some of their favorite memories, from sharing a green room with Jimmy Carter to cheering on Philip Seymour Hoffman with the actor’s mom.
Where does TIFF sit among the other film festivals? And how has it changed?
TOM BERNARD It’s changed as it changes with their leaders. To me, in the early ’80s, the Toronto Film Festival was the festival of festivals, and that’s what they called it. They had the best movies that were in any festival, as well as the best movies that they curated for that festival. The audience in Canada was so enthusiastic. That audience got every note of every movie to a point where they amplified it too much. So if you didn’t know the festival, and you went into a movie there, you’d say, “I gotta buy that, man. The crowd really went for it.” It seems now that the Toronto festival is looking for exclusivity on certain movies and looking to try and be part of an Oscar campaign, which is something that happened simply because they changed the dates of the Oscars. In the old days, the Oscars were the last week in March, beginning of April, so it wasn’t a festival where you could launch a movie and try and get it in that conversation.
MICHAEL BARKER The value of the Toronto Film Festival comes down to two things for us. One is the audiences, who are very spontaneous and responsive and broad-based. You can feel what you have in a movie. It really sets the tone for any campaign on a movie. But the other aspect of it that is so important for Tom and me, going all the way back to United Artists Classics, are the filmmakers themselves. This is the festival where we bonded with the major filmmakers over the many years — going all the way back to when we started was [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and [Werner] Herzog — and then we had major French filmmakers like Louis Malle. Norman Jewison was a real mainstay of the festival. In the first 20 years we went there, he would have a major picnic on Sunday that everybody went to out at his ranch.
What are some favorite screenings that stick out over the years?
BERNARD The festival is a long festival, so if you stick it out till the end, every now and then there’s something that pops up. One year, I drew the card to stick it out to the end. I went to see the movie Orlando, and nobody was in there from any of the other companies. I walked out as I went, “Oh my God, [we have] got to get this right away.” And we got it. Another memory is when we had a Jonathan Demme movie that was a documentary on Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter came with Rosalynn, and so we were hanging with Jimmy Carter. He was pulled away for interviews, [so] Michael and I ended up in a room for an hour with Rosalynn, and she just talked to us, and I felt like we were part of some diplomatic group.
BARKER She treated us like we were guests in the White House, but we were in the green room of the Elgin Theatre.
What do you see as the changes that need to happen in the specialty box office space?
BERNARD We’ve been doing this for a long, long time. We ran into DVDs. We ran into CDs. We ran into HBO, and into so many different other ways that movies are seen and theatrical survived. One of the problems today is that there is still a huge appetite for film, but the biggest problem is that the major theater chains are just starting to adapt to modern-day business, where they use the data of their customers to alert the customers of what’s playing in the theaters. They have just not been able to embrace getting the data on their customers. This person is an action person, and we got an action movie coming to our theater in a couple of weeks, we’re going to send that person an email so they know it’s going to be there. Regal Cinemas is starting to do stuff like that, and AMC is starting to think about stuff like that. The marketing departments are starting to become much more important in the theater chains, whereas the marketing departments in the past had to figure out how to sell you a coke and hot dog and popcorn.
Do you think there is too much emphasis placed on box office returns for specialty titles?
BARKER Box office performance is not the entire story, especially on movies like ours. Because our goal is to get the highest box office we can get, but at the same time, our goal is to make these films evergreen. There are more revenues coming from other revenue streams than ever before, but you can’t diminish the theatrical release, even if the box office is not what it was before. If you make that distinctive marketing impression on the audience and the movie is high-quality, that movie will have an afterlife that will keep giving and keep giving.
Any other TIFF memories you would be willing to share?
BARKER We had, many years ago, the film of the one-woman show Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe with Lily Tomlin. That film premiered at Toronto, and we would stand at the back, watching the audience, and while we were watching the audience, she was performing the entire show for me in a whisper while it was going on.
BERNARD We needed a party for our PR and our talent like Mark Ruffalo. We had all these movie stars and the top critics, but we didn’t have enough money to really get a really good [party]. I had this friend who was a lawyer [in Toronto] who actually represented major garbage companies — Chauncey Durkin III — and I asked him, “Do you know any place we could do this?” Chauncey said, “You know what? There’s this restaurant right down the street from my apartment and I’ll split the party with you. I’ll invite my friends, and I’ll keep them on one side of the restaurant, and they won’t interact with your talent, and we’ll save money.” I said, “Hell, let’s do it.” Sure enough, at the end of the night, Mark Ruffalo’s got his arm around one of Chauncey’s friends, they’ve all mingled together and everybody had the greatest time.
BARKER We had several of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s films, and I remember his mother would always come to the festival because she lived in Rochester. At a screening of one of his movies we had, Owning Mahowny, there was the Q&A afterwards, and someone says, “Mr. Hoffman, we think you are the greatest actor of your generation.” And his mother yelled out from the back of the theater, “You can say that again!” I will never forget that.
Source link