I’ve been covering the Toronto International Film Festival for 30 of the 50 years of its existence. I’ve dusted off some memories from those years as a personal look back at the fest’s first half century.
2015: Hosting the press conferences at TIFF is always a gamble. For every great question from the press pit, there are an equal number of inane ones that only tick the celebrities off. At the “Our Brand is Crisis” conference someone asked Sandra Bullock about her character’s grown-out roots. The Oscar winner replied as best she could and when she finished, co-star George Clooney chimed in, “Aren’t you glad you asked that question?” Later she shut down a silly query regarding how she keeps her bum as toned as it is in the film. “It’s so sad that you just want to talk about the butt,” she said, before tersely adding that leg lifts are the secret to posterior pertness.
2014: Robert Pattinson, doing press for “Maps to the Stars,” told me what Hollywood was before camera phones: “When I first started going to LA everyone was underage and if you were a famous actor the rules did not apply. You could be a sixteen-year-old and go into a club but now that there are camera phones everywhere that doesn’t exist anymore. That period was so weird. You’d see a fourteen-year-old actor wasted, doing lines of blow on the table. It was crazy. Now they just do it at their parent’s house.”
2019: David Foster’s candor. At the gala for the doc “David Foster: Off the Record” the hit-maker joked with director Barry Avrich about the artists NOT included in the film. “Where’s Boz Scaggs? Where’s NSYC? Where’s Richard Marx?” Avrich replied, “He turned us down.” With timing that Jack Benny would admire Foster paused, looked at the audience and said, “Well then, f**k Richard Marx.”
2020: During one of TIFF’s pandemic years, I hosted a reunion panel for Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” featuring actors Vincent D’Onofrio, Arliss Howard, and Katharina Kubrick. On the panel they shared anecdotes about the grueling boot camp training and Kubrick’s meticulous directing style. In a first for TIFF, the pre-taped panel was aired in drive in theatres before a screening of the restored film.
2016: During the press conference I hosted with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Iggy Pop about the Stooges documentary “Gimme Danger,” the rock god choked up when he spoke about the comeback of his legendary band. “I put almost eight years into the original group, and I put about 12 into the comeback. During those 12 years, the whole repertoire was covered, all three albums,” he said. “Every member of the group during the 12-year period, and our sidemen, graduated with honors. Meaning that when they passed away, they had houses, money and bad habits. These are the three things a rock star is supposed to have. They got their rock and their recognition, alright?”
2011: Rumor had it that Madonna forbid TIFF volunteers from looking her in the eye during the screenings of her film “W.W.” or the press conference, which I hosted. Turns out it wasn’t true, although there was at least one “volunteer” the singer probably wanted to ignore. At the end of the press conference a woman in an orange volunteer t-shirt asked for an autograph, claiming it was for another volunteer who was too shy to ask. Turns out the woman was not a volunteer, but a shill for an autograph mill who make big bucks off of celebrity signatures.
2024 Tweet: Things I learned at #TIFF #123: If you’re nervous about public speaking, eat a banana before waking on stage. Full of B vitamins, they help calm nerves and contain tryptophan, a protein that the body converts into serotonin, the ‘happy hormone’ which will keep your mood upbeat.
2019: Stand near any press person during TIFF and you are guaranteed to hear this, “I’m so tired.” It’s a grind to cover the festival in a meaningful way, but the complaint has become a joke, most memorable made by director Ron Mann who wore a t-shirt emblazoned with “I’M TIRED” in bog bold letters.
In the early days of my festival coverage, I didn’t have an off switch. I made it a mission to see as many movies as possible and talk to anyone and everyone who would speak to me on camera. I can now tell you that’s not the best way to go about things. One year, for example, Stellan Skarsgård had several films in the fest, and me, in my fest-addled brain, formed them all into one epic film. As a result, I asked him questions that referred to all the movies as if they were one. He gamely answered the first few questions before it dawned on him what was going on. He could have gotten up and left, but instead, took control of the interview and generously molded his answers into something we could actually use
2023: The 4K “Stop Making Sense” restoration of the four-decade old movie is a joyful, high-energy revisiting of a classic concert film. A document of a band working at the top of their game, it captures the love of music and performance in a way few other have. And it’s got a good and you can dance to it, which people did in the theater I saw this in.
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