Deadline Hollywood - TIFF Magazine - 10/6-16/18

Toronto International Film Festival

S E P T E M B E R 6 - 16 , 2 0 18 D E A D L I N E .C O M

TIFF 2018

HOTLIST DAN FOGELMAN

On the importance of sentimentality

JOHN C. REILLY

The passion behind The Sisters Brothers

JESSIE BUCKLEY

The TIFF breakout ready for her moment

THE RIVALS RETURN

Four Oscar winners face off again

OFC

A MILLION LITTLE PIECES

Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson breathe new life into James Frey’s controversial addiction memoir WWW.DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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DIRECTOR Sébastien Pilote CAST Karelle Tremblay Pierre-Luc Brillant Luc Picard François Papineau Marie-France Marcotte

CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA celebrates film at

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The Land of Steady Habits Nicole Holofcener gathers major talent for Netflix

10 White Boy Rick

Yann Demange makes his US feature debut

10 Beautiful Boy

Returning titans, fresh voices, and a definitive start on the road to the Oscars, this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is another cornucopia of cinematic delights. But where to start with TIFF’s expansive program?

Our inaugural TIFF Hotlist is Deadline’s guide to the hottest movies and players coming to Canada this year.

Felix Van Groeningen’s father-son addiction memoir

12 Teen Spirit

Elle Fanning surprises in Max Minghella’s musical

12 The Old Man & the Gun

David Lowery captures Robert Redford’s last stand

14 A Million Little Pieces

Sam and Aaron TaylorJohnson adapt James Frey

20 High Life

French auteur Claire Denis on her atypical sci-fi film

22 Hotel Mumbai

Dev Patel stars in Anthony Maras’s true-life terror siege

24 The Sisters Brothers

John C. Reilly discusses Jacques Audiard’s fresh Western

27 Wild Rose

Jessie Buckley sings country in Tom Harper’s story of hope

28 Life Itself

Dan Fogelman’s personal essay on celebrating humanity

ON THE COVER Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson photographed for Deadline Hollywood

by David Vintiner

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DIRECTOR Denys Arcand CAST Alexandre Landry Maripier Morin Rémy Girard Louis Morissette Maxim Roy Pierre Curzi Vincent Leclerc PRODUCER Denise Robert

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS celebrates film at

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Nicole Holofcener With her new film The Land of Steady Habits in Gala Presentations, the director extols the virtues of working with Netflix WHAT WAS IT IN TED THOMPSON’S NOVEL THAT SPOKE TO YOU? My agent sent me the book and I immediately connected with it. I loved the highly damaged main character and the shameful way he behaves.

He's basically a good person who makes these terrible choices that affect everyone in his life, and with tragic results.

It's mostly about fathers and sons, and having two sons, I related to a lot of it. I was also happy to be given the chance to direct a male lead—hopefully helping to get me out of the chick-flick ghetto.

Ben Mendelsohn truly shows a different side of himself in this film versus the villainous roles he’s played in the past. How did you know he was right?

I saw Ben in Animal Kingdom and Killing Them Softly and I just fell for him in every way; his obvious talent, his very watchable and constantly changing face and his sense of humor even when playing a despicable person.

I pursued him and happily found out he was a fan of my movies, so he was involved very quickly. I didn't worry for a second whether or not he could play a character like this. I find him amazing.

You have such a versatile group of actors who can play all parts—Edie Falco, Connie Britton, Bill Camp.

I basically cast one part at a time after Ben. I had lunch with Thomas Mann a while ago and we loved each other's work, so when the time came to cast that part I just went to him. I thought of Edie right away because I've always wanted to work with her—who doesn't? Casting

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the part of Charlie [Charlie Tahan] was the most difficult. I had so many good options and so many different ways to go with the character. He had to be young and not too vulnerable, smart but not too sophisticated. Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp were available at the same time so I grabbed them, and Connie Britton— of course I'd go after Connie Britton.

When it comes to getting an indie drama off the ground, will you hold out for that one actor you want?

Thankfully I've never had to hold out for an actor, so I'm not sure if I would or not. I usually don't want to

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SET SYNERGY Holofcener directs Mendelsohn in his role as the “highly damaged" main character Anders Hill.

wait that long. If an actor takes forever to just to read a script I get pretty anxious. But if I really, really wanted someone—like Ben—I figure it would be worth the wait. As long as I was working on other things.

Netflix has a reputation for providing creative freedom. Was that your experience?

Netflix stepped in and let me cast who I

wanted. That alone was a dream. They gave me some notes on the script and on the movie—I did some, I didn't do some, and they were supportive the whole time. They really wanted me to make the movie I wanted to make. Even though the movie won't be in theaters for longer than a minute, I had so much freedom and it will most likely get seen more than any of my movies—albeit on tiny devices.

—Anthony D’Alessandro DEADLINE.COM

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White Boy Rick ’71’s Yann Demange makes his US debut with the Matthew McConaughey starrer in Special Presentations YANN DEMANGE HAS AN uncanny gift for capturing the essence of a time and a place. In his powerful debut, ’71, he brought the Northern Irish troubles vividly to life. His follow-up, and first US feature, tells the story of Richard Wershe Jr., a teenage drug dealer in 1980s Detroit who became the FBI’s youngest ever informant.

It has all the trappings of an action film, but that’s not what interested Demange. “It was the themes that attracted me, really,” says the Brit. “His family were trying to survive abject poverty in Detroit, which, a long time ago, was the picture postcard of the American Dream. It was the city.

But then, as we know, capitalism failed it, there was complete economic collapse, and the rest of the country turned their back on it. It’s also a fascinating story of how the system abused this poor boy. They made him an informant for the FBI at the age of 14. I mean, what the fuck?”

To play Wershe Sr., Demange enlisted the services of Matthew McConaughey, but the director was adamant that the lead should not go to a known name as well.

“We ended up street casting. We were searching for the best part of a year, and we finally found a kid in Baltimore. He’s had a very tough life and he’s only 15 years old. He gives the film a barometer of truth.” —Damon Wise

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Beautiful Boy In Gala Presentations, Felix Van Groeningen serves up a father-son story like no other IN FELIX VAN GROENINGEN’S Beautiful Boy, Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet tell the true story of David Sheff and his meth-addicted son Nic, whose dual memoirs form the film’s source material—a factor that initially sparked immense appeal for Van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown).

“Father and son, two books, two points of view,” he says. “It was like love at first sight. It has all the things I’m interested in, like family dynamics and people losing control.”

For David and Nic Sheff, entrusting their story to Van Groeningen made sense, since they’d seen

his previous work. “I think I gained their trust with Broken Circle,” Van Groeningen says. They also met Chalamet and Carell, “so it wasn’t a big mystery. I felt that was important.”

Also, the actors had great fatherson chemistry. “It was super exciting to see how different they were, but also so extremely matched. Steve came in very at his ease with a bit of distance. He took his time to really go into the role; he let himself slip into it. With Timothée, every scene he had an idea. He just jumped right in. I had this young kid who has all this energy, and then Steve is laidback. He has so much experience and yet he just came so humbly to the set.”

While “it’s not a Hollywood happy ending at all”, Van Groeningen says, “it’s good for people to know that this is a positive story in the end. But that’s not necessarily where the movie ends. It can’t be that simple.”

—Antonia Blyth

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MIDNIGHT MADNESS

DIRECTOR

CAST

Kiah Roache-Turner

Ben O’Toole, Monica Bellucci, Caroline Ford, Tess Haubrich, Epine Bob Savea, David Wenham

celebrates film at

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Teen Spirit Max Minghella turns his love of pop into his directorial debut, a Special Presentations musical starring Elle Fanning WHILE MAX MINGHELLA

Minghella had producer Fred

is currently best known as

Berger (La La Land) on board.

Nick, a rare good guy in The

“An unemployed actor as a

Handmaid’s Tale, he’s about

first-time director,” Minghella

excited about doing some-

impossible,” Minghella says.

to make his directorial debut

says of snagging Berger,

thing that hasn't been done

“It's a really, really remark-

with an ambitious and

“None of it felt sexy. But, for

quite before, and really using

able performance.”

unexpected musical feature.

some reason, he decided it

music to have a visceral

Driven by an unapologetic

was crazy enough to make.”

effect,” but it’s Fanning

minding a challenging debut

love for pop music, Minghella

Minghella really credits as

project, Minghella’s expecta-

began writing Teen Spirit

“escapist and fun”, Minghella

“the heart and soul of the

tions remain charmingly

almost 10 years ago, crafting

says his mission was also to

film”. She not only learned to

humble. “I really hope it's a

the story of Violet—a Polish

make a musical that “took the

speak Polish, and endured

movie that people would like

girl pursuing her dream of

audience seriously, took the

long hours of dance training,

to see more than once,” he

singing stardom on the Isle

characters seriously, and took

but also sings all the music

says. “That didn't have too

of Wight.

the pop music seriously.”

live. “She does things for this

many boring bits in it, and

Berger and Minghella

film I've been told profes-

wasn’t too long.”

were “from the outset very

sional singers would find

—Antonia Blyth

In addition to his “dear friend” Jamie Bell as EP,

While he wanted it to be

Despite skillfully master-

The Old Man & the Gun David Lowery’s new film in Special Presentations also marks the final screen performance for Robert Redford, who has announced his retirement from acting AFTER A CAREER FEATURING some of the most beloved screen performances of all time, Robert Redford takes his final bow as an actor with David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun. It simply can’t be missed, especially since it already looks like vintage Redford (replete with a title font reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid).

The story is based on real-life career criminal and prison escape artist Forrest Tucker, with the role crafted specifically for Redford by Lowery.

Said the 82-year-old icon recently,

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“Why not go out with something that’s very upbeat and positive?”

Tucker adds to a list of indelible roles for Redford that include the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, Hubbell Gardiner, Jay Gatsby, The Condor, Bob Woodward, Roy Hobbs and Denys Finch Hatton. Last year, he cut a fine figure on the fest

circuit with Our Souls at Night, which reteamed him with his Barefoot in the Park co-star Jane Fonda.

Redford wears many hats. He won a Best Director Oscar his first time out with 1980s family drama Ordinary People, and he has said he expects to make more movies from behind the camera. A large part of his vast legacy also resides in his environmental activism and with the Sundance Institute, which he founded, supporting independent filmmaking for decades and showing no signs of stopping. —Nancy Tartaglione

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Some 15 years after Warner Bros. picked it up and fast-tracked it as a studio movie— before it imploded into controversy— James Frey’s harrowing drug addiction tale A Million Little Pieces makes its TIFF premiere in Special Presentations.

With a budget under $5 million, Sam Taylor-Johnson brings it across the line with Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead, in a script they wrote together.

Mike Fleming Jr. meets the filmmaking family as they prepare for their premiere.

Into Frey the

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A

Million Little Pieces is as raw, bloody and messy as James Frey wrote it. With the startling intensity he shocked Toronto with in Nocturnal Animals two years ago, Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Frey through his evolution, as he turns from a hopeless, cornered animal descending down a drug-induced death spiral before finally embracing the help of a group of fellow addicts to create distance from the seduction of crack cocaine and hard liquor ravaging his body.

It’s a dark, scrappy, low-budget affair—necessary to relieve the pressure that led to the implosion of the studio version of this adaptation a decade and a half ago.

When A Million Little Pieces was first published, it announced Frey as a major new literary voice—endorsed

by Oprah herself—and landed him a fast-tracked studio adaptation at Warner Bros. But it all blew up when press stories exposed that Frey had falsified elements of his background and the fate of characters in the Hazelden rehab clinic in Minnesota.

Oprah brought Frey back out to defend himself, along with his editor Nan Talese, and subjected them to a relentless hourlong grilling. She dropped her endorsement. Frey’s literary agent dumped him over “trust issues” and his publisher had to settle lawsuits and offer refunds from disgruntled readers.

But time heals, and Frey was able to get his career back on track, becoming a bestselling author and the proprietor of fiction factory Full Fathom Five. When Warner Bros. let go of their option, Frey wasn’t cash-strapped enough

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to need to relive that earlier controversy with a new deal; especially not under the current, unforgiving glare of social media.

Still, he had belief enough in their understanding of the story to let the Taylor-Johnsons run with it. Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson had been an inseparable couple since she cast him in her directorial debut, 2009’s Nowhere Boy, as a young John Lennon. They liked the idea of pulling something more modest together, after the miserable time Sam had directing the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie. She’d been expecting to make a trilogy out of E.L. James’s erotic fiction series, but even though her first chapter grossed $571 million, she withdrew. Speculation was that the unprecedented level of creative control Universal offered James, a first-time novelist, in order to beat out the offers pouring in from other studios, caused issues.

Sam had been captivated by Frey’s memoir since she read it shortly after its publication, before she ever made her feature debut.

“I loved the way it was told,” she remembers. “90 miles an hour is a good way to describe the ferocity and pace of his writing. I remember feeling exhausted and elated at the end, thinking it would make an amazing movie. Later, I’d hear or read that some other filmmaker signed on and I’d feel a twinge of jealousy.”

After they met, she gave it to Aaron, who devoured it. He says: “The journey of redemption, the light at the end of the tunnel, and the rhythm James put into his writing which provides such energy, it made us want to try and translate that into

a character on screen.”

“But it wasn’t available,” Sam sighs.

When the rights reverted, Sam’s agent asked her if she’d read it. “I said, ‘Stay right there,’ and couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.” She then emailed Frey and asked him if he could jump on the phone with her.

Within 20 minutes he called. “I asked, was it true about A Million Little Pieces? He said, ‘Yeah, you want [the rights]?’ I told him yes. He said, ‘OK, go make the movie.’”

Frey may not have been eager for an encore of scrutiny, but he was moved by the Taylor-Johnsons’ enthusiasm, and he saw a film that might help other addicts who felt as lost as he once did. He told them he didn’t need to be involved at all; that he wasn’t sure if he’d even watch the film. He changed his mind on both fronts, and can be glimpsed in a cameo early on in the film. He delayed his book tour to come to Toronto. He may not totally be at peace with the way he was raked over the coals, but he says he’s moved on.

“There’s an area of literature that’s not really fiction and it’s not really nonfiction,” he says. “That’s where I’ve always worked, and I’ve not shied from that, even though I will say the book was submitted to publishers—all of them—as a novel.”

Frey celebrates 25 years of sobriety this month. “There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t hear from somebody about how the book changed their life in some way. It wasn’t intended to be a self-help book, but the continual gift is that it really does help people.”

Once the Taylor-Johnsons had the rights, things moved quickly. “I always

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had such a gut response to the book, and Aaron immediately felt it was a character he wanted to play,” Sam says. They’d never written together before, but they were in production a year after doing the rights deal. In that 12-month window, “We had to write a script, find a financier, get a cast and a green light,” Aaron remembers. “It was a bit fast for my liking.

But, to Sam, even that pace made her impatient. She kept saying, ‘I just want to make it, let’s make it.’”

They found their financier in Brad Weston and Pam Abdy’s new venture Makeready, and they assembled a remarkable cast and a 20-day shoot for under $5 million. Billy Bob Thornton plays Frey’s rehabbing mobster friend Leonard, and Charlie Hunnam plays the brother who escorts the disheveled Frey to rehab and whose calm tethers Frey through the storm. Casting Hunnam

was Sam’s idea, after they came so close to working together on Fifty Shades of Grey, when Hunnam was briefly set for kinky billionaire Christian Grey.

“The very difficult lessons I went through on Fifty Shades—every negative aspect of that experience— helped me here,” Sam says. “I felt bolstered by the positive aspects of how this movie was made, the tightness that our cast and crew developed. I am never one to look back with regret; for me it is how an experience feeds the future. How am I going to change so I don’t repeat an experience that was uncomfortable and difficult?”

“Sam has her voice back,” says Aaron. “To see her go from that big studio movie, where she had to make compromises, the most exciting thing for me was to be able to help some magic happen for her. It

was a year in which we said, ‘We’re not taking jobs, we’re just sitting down, writing this ourselves, and fully immersing in doing it well.’”

As for the controversy behind the book’s publication, the movie tips a wink at it by opening with a quote from Mark Twain: “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

“Some might have seen the controversy as a roadblock,” Aaron says. “If anything, it allowed us to impose our own artistic interpretation of the book. We were able to adapt it based on our own emotional responses, and interpret it in a physical and visceral-visual way that lent itself to Sam’s filmmaking.

We never read or were indebted to any draft or the vision of anyone else. This was a real blessing for us two, to be able to say what we wanted to say.” ★

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The Great Oscar Rematches Setting the stage for another dramatic race to the Dolby Theatre, two pairs of Oscar frontrunners in recent years return to TIFF with four hotly-anticipated new movies

Alfonso Steve vs.

Cuarón McQueen IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE THE LAST feature films from Steve McQueen and Alfonso Cuarón. Their 2013 Oscar matchup brought both awards season glory, even as a bittersweet decision split the top Oscars for the talented pair.

Cuarón’s intimate space epic Gravity charged him to a Best Director Oscar, but it was McQueen who took the stage for Best Picture when 12 Years a Slave was announced the winner.

Both were first-time director nominees then, and now they have a chance of facing off again with two TIFF movies that should be on every festivalgoer’s must-see list. Can McQueen’s switch from arthouse to studio picture with Widows (in Gala Presentations) be the ticket to putting him back in the ring with Cuarón, who himself switches from studio picture to arthouse with the very personal black-and-white Mexican drama Roma (Special Presentations)? Will history repeat itself, reverse itself, or result in a wash with both shut out this time?

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Damien Barry vs.

Chazelle Jenkins IT WAS ONLY TWO SEASONS AGO THAT DAMIEN Chazelle and Barry Jenkins brought their Oscar hopefuls to TIFF and started a major frontrunner rivalry. They also befell the split decision when the Oscars were finally handed out, with Chazelle’s La La Land winning six Academy Awards including Best Director, while Jenkins’ Moonlight took Best Picture. Indeed, the latter victory also marked the biggest gaffe in Oscar history, when a mishandled envelope resulted in a momentary—but quickly corrected—declaration in La La Land’s favor.

This time, Chazelle goes to space with First Man (Gala Presentations), his story about Neil Armstrong’s journey to become the first person ever to set foot on the moon. Meanwhile, Jenkins is offering up If Beale Street Could Talk, which gets its world premiere in Special Presentations, and adapts James Baldwin’s poignant novel of the same name. So what happens this time in the bittersweet saga of Chazelle and Jenkins?

Will they both be back in the race for Oscar, and, if so, will the Academy get the winner right on the first try this time? Toronto holds the first clues. —Pete Hammond

DEADLINE.COM

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No Fake News The TIFF line-up of documentaries this year puts a heavy emphasis on the stories dominating news cycles for the past 12 months JUST THREE MONTHS AFTER President Trump’s stormy appearance at the G7 summit in rural Quebec, his presence is making an impact in Canada again.

TIFF kicks off with the world premiere of Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 11/9, his acerbic take on the Trump presidency. The title, a play on the director’s Fahrenheit 9/11 doc on George W. Bush, refers to the date Trump was declared the victor in the 2016 election.

“Michael Moore's strongest work has happened when a Republican has been in office,” observes Thom Powers, TIFF’s documentary programmer. “It raises the excitement level around what we're going to see from him.”

Moore’s latest is one of several films on the TIFF documentary slate that drill into right-wing American politics. Doc legend Errol Morris goes deep on former Trump campaign CEO and White House strategist Steve Bannon in American Dharma, while Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, from director Alexis Bloom, trains its eye on the late Fox News chief and GOP powerbroker.

Call it collusion if you like, but

TIFF has also programmed a pair of documentaries on Russian politics for good measure. Meeting Gorbachev, directed by Werner Herzog and André Singer, is based on several interviews Herzog conducted with the final leader of the USSR. Putin’s Witnesses, directed

by Vitaly Mansky, examines the man who now rules the Kremlin.

There is a political character to some of the other leading docs at TIFF, including This Changes Everything, a world premiere from director Tom Donahue that explores the Time’s Up movement, featuring commentary from an array of big names.

“The film assembles a who's who of women in Hollywood: Meryl Streep, Shonda Rhimes, Geena Davis, Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Oh, and on and on,” Powers notes. “I'm really looking forward to audiences experiencing that.”

On a related theme, Mark Cousins documents the under-appreciated contributions of female directors in Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema. “He's looking at the artistry of their craft and doing

it in a global context that is going to introduce you to over a hundred women filmmakers,” comments Powers, “and I don't care how big a cinephile you are, there's going to be a lot of discoveries in that process.”

Discoveries are to be made up and down the TIFF documentary line-up, which boasts more than two dozen films.

Among the gems that shouldn’t be missed are The Biggest Little Farm,

by John Chester. “The filmmaker and his wife spent eight years taking a piece of land outside of Los Angeles [where] the soil was depleted and trying to bring it back to life with bio-dynamic farming,” Powers says. “That film is really extraordinary. Just beautifully told.”

Ghost Fleet, by Shannon Service and Jeffrey Waldron, takes on human trafficking in Thailand’s fishing industry.

That’s one of the notable acquisition titles among TIFF docs.

“I think in the 13 years I've been doing this I've never seen so many documentaries coming into the festival for sale, represented by major sales agents,” Powers says.

“Coming off of the summer with the theatrical success of RBG, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Three Identical Strangers, I know from talking to distributors, there's a lot of anticipation to find the next big thing.” —Matthew Carey DEADLINE.COM

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Claire Denis The French auteur on her new film, High Life, working with Robert Pattinson and the death of her mother

HIGH LIFE REPRESENTS A RADICAL DEPARTURE OF SORTS… I don’t think so. In a way this story is very close to many of my other stories. On paper it looks like a radical departure but it’s really very intimate.

Why space?

My producer Oliver Dungey proposed an English-language film set in space about a femme fatale or a love that could be fatal. So this is how I answered that question.

Did you find yourself watching Tarkovsky or Kubrick?

My aesthetic was simple. It’s a jail.

I wanted the interior of the spaceship to look like a prison. That was my only radical beginning in terms of aesthetics. Tarkovsy, Kubrick, they were in my mind, but I thought more about jails.

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So I can understand young actresses being afraid.

Do you think festivals that receive public funding should be made to have gender parity in their line-ups?

I think it’s so much better to be chosen because the selectors like your film and not because you are a woman. I would be a little ashamed. I never felt like my films were at Cannes because I was a woman. I would have been terrified to be chosen because of my gender.

SPACEMAN Robert Pattinson stars as the criminal Monte in High Life.

Why Robert Pattinson?

I think he’s a great young man and a wonderful young actor. He is intelligent, poetic, he is like a knight to me.

I saw the four parts of Twilight when it was released. I was amazed by the two heroic young leads.

I read previously that the filming process may have been somewhat deconstructed.

Absolutely not. We followed the script.

We were very constructive. My films are not deconstructed. They are constructed in the way I like. I think some Americans think Europeans make “deconstructed” movies, but we don’t.

You once said in an interview you couldn’t care less about the Weinstein affair. Do you still feel that?

I don’t think I was reported accurately. I have had my experiences, as Jimi Hendrix said. When you are a woman in a very weak position economically or psychologically, I understand [how such things happen]. But if you’re not, if you believe you can fight back, I was like that as a young woman. I think I was raised differently, in something of a boyish way. Women who were aggressed

by Weinstein were often in demand or in a weak position. That’s terrible.

What might you make next?

I have a project around the Mediterranean Sea. I’d also like to work again with Robert; once wasn’t enough. I have a couple of movies I’m thinking about but I’m not sure… I’m afraid of the future.

When I was shooting this movie my little mother died in my arms.

I had to run to be with her. To see her pass away in my arms I realized the extent to which life is just a thin little thread; so thin. It was a terrible moment. Once you lose your mother you become very fragile. There is no more protection. It’s only naked life.

The death of a father is one thing, but to lose my mother left me entirely uncovered and without protection.

She was like a last link to childhood.

Did that impact your film?

I don’t know. Maybe in a year or two I will realize. Probably. Of course, it must have. She wanted the film to exist, though. She read the script. She loved Robert, Juliette [Binoche]. She told me I must “work, work.”

—Andreas Wiseman DEADLINE.COM

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A Representative Festival

Hotel Mumbai

It’s an especially exciting year for black actresses, as TIFF films offer plenty of chances for history to be made

Anthony Maras’s harrowing Special Presentations feature looks at the humanity at the center of the 2008 Taj Mahal Palace Hotel attacks “INDIA IS A CONSTANT source of inspiration,” Dev Patel noted last year.

The film he was promoting, Garth Davis’s 2016 TIFF entry Lion, brought the 28-year-old actor his first Oscar nomination, playing an adopted Australian man who uses his memory—as well as Google Earth—to find the village in India where he was born.

Currently, the Londonborn actor is in the UK playing one of the most British characters of all time—Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield—but his family roots will always be important. This year, both of the actor’s TIFF films were shot in part or in all in the region, the first being Michael Winterbottom’s artful neo-noir thriller The Wedding Guest, in which he plays a stranger with a hidden agenda who arrives in a Punjabi village on the eve of a local wedding.

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The second film, Hotel Mumbai, addresses one of the most shocking moments in recent Indian history, when an Islamic terrorist group attacked the luxury Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in November 2008, a show of violence that was seen as “striking a blow against a symbol of Indian wealth and progress."

It could simply have been an action film, but both Patel and Australian director Anthony Maras chose to focus on what Patel has described as “the humanity angle” inside the hotel, where the difference between the lifestyles of the waiting staff and the often superwealthy clientele could not be more pronounced. Said Patel, “It was a harrowing film to shoot, and to really get an inside look at the suffering of these people in this hotel, in this terror siege, was really eye-opening.” —Damon Wise

WITH TIFF AT THE vanguard of the fall festivals and their power to start the conversations that lead to Oscar, the festival offers the first tea leaves that give a sense of how the film industry’s continued grappling with the lack of representation in cinema is going.

And this year’s line-up shows promise, with an inclusive slate of films that look particularly good for black female performers.

There’s a hearty variety of actresses in the mix, offering a glimmer of hope that performers of color will see an increase in recognition this awards season.

All eyes are on awards favorite Viola Davis, who leads Steve McQueen’s female-fronted heist thriller Widows (Gala Presentations). She’s already nabbed a Supporting Actress Oscar for Fences, and another nom now would add to an impressive award collection that includes two Tonys, a Globe and an Emmy.

Some fresh faces could also land in the awards race. Barry

Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk (Special Presentations) has been highly anticipated since its announcement.

Newcomer Kiki Layne is the name on plenty of lips, and this potentially breakthrough role might just have the power to land her a spot on the Academy’s eventual list.

Amandla Stenberg is no stranger to the big screen but with Fox 2000’s adaptation of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (Gala Presentations) and the Amma Asante-directed drama Where Hands Touch (Special Presentations), the odds could be in favor of the Hunger Games actress.

Also worth a look are Stella Meghie’s comedy The Weekend (Special Presentations), which stars Saturday Night Live alum Sasheer Zamata, and In Fabric (Midnight Madness), the Peter Strickland-helmed drama which is led by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, also a past Oscar nominee. —Amanda N’Duka

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Further Afield There are plenty of highlights from around the world, and across the budget spectrum, in TIFF’s 2018 line-up TIFF MAY HAVE streamlined its offerings in recent years, but it still offers fertile ground for foreign and indie filmmakers bringing fresh work to the festival.

Amongst our favorites from this year’s crop, Luis Ortega’s El Angel has set the box office alight in its

native Argentina. Based on the life of serial criminal Carlos Robledo Puch, it wowed in Cannes—and has the backing of the Almodóvar brothers, like 2014 Argentine smash and Oscar nominee Wild Tales.

The Côte d’Azur also offered a launchpad for films to pay attention to like Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters, Pawel Pawlikowski’s romantic drama Cold War, Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, and Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum, all in Special Presentations. Labaki won the People’s Choice Award in

Toronto in 2011 with Where Do We Go Now? That same section offers further representation for female filmmakers with titles like Maryam Keshavarz’s Viper Club, Annabel Jankel's Tell It to the Bees and Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia. The latter sophomore effort chronicles the love affair of socialite Vita Sackville-West and literary icon Virginia Woolf.

Also interesting, Michael Winterbottom will take a turn in Special Presentations with Dev Patel-starrer The Wedding Guest, a global road movie/noir thriller, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck will unspool his return to Germanlanguage filmmaking, Never Look Away. The film brings him back to post-war East Germany with the story of a doctor and an artist, both

struggling to reconcile their personal aspirations with their country’s politics.

Plenty of eyes will

certainly be on Son of Saul director László Nemes and Sunset, his follow-up to the 2015 film that won a then first-time filmmaker the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Sunset shifts focus to pre-World War I and centers on a fearless woman who embarks on a quest to

uncover her distant past.

Lost star Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje makes a powerful directorial debut in Discovery with Farming, a harrowing recreation of his own youth as a Londonborn Nigerian foster child subjugated by a local skinhead gang and made to fight with them.

Over in Platform, Carol Morley’s crime drama Out of Blue is a neo-noir detective story. The BBC Films title stars Patricia Clarkson as a homicide detective called to investigate the shooting of a leading astrophysicist.

Other notable Platform titles include dystopian feature debut Jessica Forever from Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. With a twisty construct, Malaysiaborn Ho Wi Ding will present sci-fi crime drama Cities of Last Things, which is told in reverse chronological order.

Chinese master Zhang Yimou’s Shadow will travel to Gala Presentations. He’s a multiple Oscar nominee, but took some gruff for last year’s expensive China-US co-production gamble The Great Wall. With Shadow, he stages an epic period battle story that contrasts visuals drawing on the tradition of ink-wash painting with next-level fight sequences.

Further Gala Presentations hailing from overseas include love triangle Husband Material from prolific Indian indie star Anurag Kashyap, who's been in the spotlight again recently with Netflix series Sacred Games. Also to watch are English-language debuts from French female directors Mélanie Laurent and Claire Denis. The former’s Galveston stars Ben Foster and Elle Fanning and is adapted by True Detec-

tive’s Nic Pizzolatto from his own novel. Denis’s High Life has been on wish lists going back to Cannes and stars Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche as part of a group of criminals sent out into deep space.

—Nancy Tartaglione DEADLINE.COM

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D E A D L I N E .C O M / AWA R D S L I N E

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JOHN C. REILLY The star of Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers (Special Presentations) gears up for a different kind of Western HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH THE SISTERS BROTHERS? I did an independent feature called Terri [in 2011] that my wife, Alison Dickey, produced.

It was written by Patrick deWitt, and it was based upon one of his unpublished novels. During the shoot, he said, “Hey, I’ve written this other book, it’s called The Sisters Brothers,” so Alison read it and just tore through it. She couldn’t believe how good it was, and she thought there was a very good role in it for me.

I read it and I agreed, so we bought the rights. Then we sought out a director, and an additional producer, and we put the whole project together. Once we got Jacques Audiard on board, his production company did the film. But in terms of the set-up, getting the script written and all that, that was Alison and me.

What was it that appealed to you about this story?

I was always interested in Westerns but I was kind of tired of the clichés and the false nostalgia that we have about the Old West in America. We think it’s the sum of the movies we’ve seen about it as opposed to an actual period of time. What drew me was the emotional quality of the story. It has all the trappings of a Western, but in most Westerns, the characters are very opaque.

For example, Clint Eastwood. I worship Clint Eastwood, he’s amazing, but his whole thing is that you can’t tell what is going on with him, especially emotionally. What I loved about Patrick’s book is that you finally get inside the heart of these guys.

Did you do much research, or did you just trust your instincts?

My general thought on research is to do as much as you need to be as skilled as your character is, in whatever it is he does. The book was our main research, but we also did training with guns and horses, a lot of reading from the time, a lot of looking at archival photographs. Photography was just beginning at this time, so there are all these amazing portraits of people trying to understand what photography even was. You can see it in their faces, in those old daguerreotypes.

What did you think of the finished film, and what will people take from it?

The feedback I’ve been getting from people who've seen the film is it’s a fresh take on the Western. I’ve had some women tell me that they feel like the film examines what it means to [evolve] as a man—is there a new way to be a man? There are several main characters, and they’re all very different. One guy is stuck in the old way of being a man, another guy can see the new way but is afraid to move forward, while another guy sees the new way and is running towards it. I think Jacques was interested in exploring that. —Damon Wise DEADLINE.COM

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AFTER DARK

There’s plenty of fun to be had in TIFF’s Midnight Madness selection, a veritable festival-within-a-festival

AS THE TITLE SUGGESTS, Midnight Madness isn’t the place to go for a ruminative documentary about sheep farming.

A-festival-within-a-festival, it has its own crowds, conventions and atmosphere, turning the Ryerson Theatre into a riotous thrill-seeking Woodstock as the clock strikes 12.

In his second year at the helm, after

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taking over from Colin Geddes in 2017, Peter Kuplowsky has risen quickly to the challenge, programming films from all around the world that defy genre and, in some cases, belief, mixing cult gems with some truly leftfield blockbusters.

In the latter camp we find his opening title—Shane Black’s Predator, the veteran screenwriter’s reboot of a

cult classic—which is quickly followed by another highly anticipated entry in the field: David Gordon Green’s Halloween, which makes the bold decision to ignore every other sequel in the franchise’s history. As exciting as these movies are, though, that’s not the primary function of Midnight Madness: its raison d’être is the wordof-mouth wonders.

Some of these come from other festivals—direct from Cannes comes French director Gaspar Noé’s jawdropping psychedelic flash-mob horror Climax, as does the almost hallucinatory comedy Diamantino from Portugal. Indeed, Sundance audiences have already talked up enthusiasm for the hard-hitting Assassination Nation, in which a small community falls prey to an internet witch-hunt.

The rest, though, will be making their world premiere here: In Fabric, from the UK, in which a haunted dress dominates a small-town department store; the Red Statelike The Standoff at Sparrow Creek; supernatural thriller The Wind; and Nekrotronic, from Australia, about modern-day demon hunters.

The one to watch, however, may well be the martial arts comedy The Man Who Feels No Pain, the first title in the strand to come from India.

Fun, funky and fearlessly original, it captures perfectly the rogue spirit of Midnight Madness. —Damon Wise

DEADLINE.COM

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JESSIE BUCKLEY

For the ultimate one to watch, look to the actress whose turn in Wild Rose (Special Presentations) could be the year’s most impressive star breakout HAVING MADE AN IMPRESSION with her quiet but intense performance in 2017’s serial-killer drama Beast, Jessie Buckley turns up the volume at this year’s TIFF with Tom Harper’s Wild Rose, the perfect vehicle for her powerful, bluesy singing voice.

It’s a part that seems heaven-sent to her. And, in way, it was. “I’d worked with Tom Harper before, on the BBC’s War & Peace,” says the 28-year-old, “and one evening I just went off with him for a drink. He said, ‘I’ve just been sent this script. It’s about a girl called Rose-Lynn who comes out of prison in Glasgow. She’s got two kids and wants

to be a country music singer.’ He basically said that he wanted to do it, but he’d only do it if I did it. I literally love him so much that if he told me to lie over a train track I probably would. So, of course, I said yes.”

Despite a strong musical background, having grown up with parents who sang and performed in County Kerry, Ireland, Buckley was unfamiliar with the country style. “I’d never done country music, and, to be honest, I thought it was a bit hick,” she says. “But I just fell in love with it. It’s such a strippedback form of storytelling—such

simple stories about normal, ordinary people—and it really affected my ears and my heart in a way that I didn’t expect it to.”

Likewise, Buckley hopes RoseLynn will catch TIFF audiences off their guard in a similar way. “I hope they’ll come away with a feeling of being able to empower their own dreams, regardless of where they’re from or who they are, even if they’re a single parent with no money. We all have things that we dream about, and those things are tangible. You just have to be brave enough to catch them.” —Damon Wise DEADLINE.COM

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GUEST COLUMN

Dan

FOGELMAN

No fan of This is Us can afford to miss its creator’s new feature Life Itself (Gala Presentations), which continues his storytelling mastery in celebrating human life and all of its complicated highs and lows. Writing exclusively for Deadline, Fogelman explains his unabashed belief in the essential nature of sentimentality.

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FAMILY AFFAIR Olivia Wilde and Oscar Isaac as the couple at the center of Fogelman’s Life Itself.

IT IS 2008.

I am 31 years old, and I am sitting in a chair in a doctor’s exam room next to my blonde, youthful looking, 60-year-old mother. My mother, we have learned, has a grapefruitsized tumor in her abdomen. It has never caused any symptoms nor discomfort. It has evaded detection.

But it is cancerous, and—in short order, we’ve been told—it will begin growing into her other organs.

It will kill her.

We sit in the exam room in Philadelphia awaiting a determination from one of the top surgeons in the country. Will he be able to operate?

Will he be able to save her?

My mother has her Oprah book club book in her lap. She is always reading and she is always eating. She usually reads sprawling family sagas.

She usually eats chocolate.

The doctor enters. He is charming, he is lovely, and he makes her feel special. Mom likes him, I can tell.

He asks her what book she’s reading. She tells him and he smiles.

He offers that perhaps it’s time she starts reading another favorite book of his. He tells her she needs to start reading the Bible.

The tumor is inoperable, he says with a false, sad, smile.

The floor falls out of the room. It takes everything in me not to knock the smug prick out. I come real close.

“It’s going to be fine,” I assure my mother as I load her into my rental car.

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FROM NEW YORK TO SPAIN Antonio Banderas and Àlex Monner co-star in the multi-location Amazon drama.

She is crying softly. There is another fancy doctor, and I’ve used my very fancy connections to get in contact with him. I’m going to overnight him Mom’s files for the weekend and we’ll get good news by Monday. I know it.

I race home towards her condo in New Jersey. There’s a FedEx store near her place, I can overnight her paperwork from there. The store closes at 5. I race into the lot at 4:58. I double park, grab her files and x-rays, and rush in.

I’m trying to put her papers in order as I enter.

“We are closed!” shouts an Indian man with a thick accent.

I’m babbling. “Just give me one second. I just have an overnight package to San Francisco…”

“The last pickup already went out.”

“No, no, I just need one second,” I stammer. “I’ll have it ready in one second.” Papers are falling to the floor.

X-rays are slipping out. My hands are shaking. And for the first time since my mother has been diagnosed—for the first time since I was maybe 15 years old—I am starting to cry.

No, not just cry. In my adult life, this is as close I’ve ever come to “sobbing”.

Suddenly, there is a hand on

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my shoulder. It is the man with the accent. “I will call them back,” he says. “Take your time, we will get the package out.”

It occurs to me, even as it is happening, that this would make a great scene in a movie one day.

Eventually I find my mother a different top-notch surgeon. He has a great bedside manner. He feels confident. He will fix her.

My mom dies in surgery.

I spend the next year wallowing in whiskey-sopped misery. I work, but rarely leave the house or socialize.

I wonder, quite rationally and analytically, if I will ever come back from this.

About a year from the day she dies, I meet a young blonde woman.

She is rarely without a sprawling family novel in her lap. She is constantly eating chocolate.

A year after my mother dies, I meet my wife.

It is not easy, these days, to choose to see the beauty in the human experience. It is not in vogue and it is certainly not considered “cool” or “artistic”. Ugliness envelops us right now. The internet is filled with trolls and skeptics, haters and hackers.

It is a scary choice, these days, to make anything that leads with its heart. Leading with your heart exposes your most crucial organ to those very trolls and skeptics and yes, sometimes, to the most cynical of film critics.

But I choose to see connections in our existences. I choose to see the romance, and the beauty that is often born from tragedy.

I choose to see love… and when it’s too dark to see it, I choose to try and find it. I made my new film for the two women in my story.

But also for the man at that FedEx store. And for every person who has experienced love and loss, kindness and love. I made it not just for my mother and father, but for your mother and father.

And theirs.

I made this film so people could walk out of a movie theater feeling better than they did when they walked in. And if that’s sentimental, so be it. I just told you about the time I sobbed in a FedEx store and how I married a woman who reminded me of my mother.

“Sentimental” is the least of my problems. ★

DEADLINE.COM

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SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

DIRECTOR Tom Harper CAST Jessie Buckley Julie Walters Sophie Okonedo

celebrates film at

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IS PROUD TO

CELEBRATE OUR PARTNERS AT

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8/29/18 2:32 PM