Telluride Post-Fest Analysis: Feinberg and Keegan on Rocky Mountain Highs and Lows

Per annual tradition, The Hollywood Reporter’s executive editor (awards) Scott Feinberg and senior editor (film) Rebecca Keegan huddled on the last day of the Telluride Film Festival to dissect their Labor Day weekend in the Rockies …

REBECCA KEEGAN Scott, we’re writing this from the corner of the bar at the New Sheridan Hotel, located on the main street of Telluride, on the fifth and final day of the fest (an additional day was added in celebration of its 50th birthday). Most attendees are on their way out of town. And a tumbleweed literally just blew past us.

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SCOTT FEINBERG It’s nice to have an extra day in paradise, Rebecca. But paradise looked a bit different this year: Because of the strikes, some of the biggest names at the fest were not “film people,” but rather the likes of Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste (subject of the doc American Symphony, a sales title), swimming coach Bonnie Stoll (who is played by Jodie Foster in Netflix’s Nyad) and Mr Chow himself, restaurateur Michael Chow (subject of the HBO doc aka Mr. Chow).

KEEGAN Well, thanks to SAG-AFTRA issuing some last-minute interim agreements to films made outside the AMPTP system, a few traditional actors were here — among them, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (star of A24’s Tuesday); Ethan Hawke, Laura Linney and Maya Hawke (director and stars of the sales title Wildcat); Dakota Johnson (star of the sales title Daddio), etc. And, as a private citizen, so was Emma Stone. Stone didn’t appear at any Q&As for her Searchlight movie, Poor Things, nor did she do any press, since Searchlight is a subsidiary of AMPTP member company Disney.

One thing we’ve wondered is how movies whose stars can’t do promotion at the fall festivals would be impacted. I do think the strike is hurting some films’ ability to break through. George C. Wolfe’s Netflix film, Rustin, for instance, rides on the electricity of Colman Domingo’s performance as civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, but Domingo couldn’t attend. And the film has the most famous backers in the business, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, whose production company, Higher Ground, produced, but as an honorary SAG member and a vocal labor supporter, the former president could not attend. He did record a video statement about the film, pre-strike, that Netflix played before its screenings, but can you imagine how an in-person appearance would have made an event out of not just Rustin, but the entire festival? Also, Gael García Bernal was to have received a festival tribute for his performance in Roger Ross Williams’ Cassandro, which dazzled critics at Sundance and would have benefited from the publicity here ahead of Amazon releasing it in theaters Sept. 15.

FEINBERG Among the actors who were able to promote their work here were several non-American stars of non-English-language movies that were not made/will not be distributed by AMPTP companies. Take, for example, this week’s THR cover subject, the German actress Sandra Hüller, star of both Anatomy of a Fall (Neon) and The Zone of Interest (A24), the first and second place finishers at Cannes, who could conceivably land nominations in both the lead and supporting actress categories. Attending with one of her new U.S. power publicists, she was — very deservedly — able to attract way more attention than she would have in a normal, star-packed year at the fest.

KEEGAN Based on my highly scientific polling on gondolas, in theater lines and while waiting for my breakfast sandwich at The Butcher & The Baker, Poor Things was the one movie virtually everyone seemed to love. Which is really saying something when you consider that it features, among many, many other oddities, Stone flicking a cadaver’s penis and referring to sex as “furious jumping.” In an earlier era of the Academy, Poor Things would have been too weird and too lusty for voters. But this is the post-Shape of Water and Parasite Academy, and I think they’ll embrace the film’s audacity.

FEINBERG I’m totally with you. In fact, Poor Things could wind up with as many Oscar nominations as any film this season — as also was the case with Yorgos Lanthimos’ last film, 2018’s The Favourite, which also was written by Tony McNamara, counted Stone among its stars and was released by Searchlight — and Stone, who is just 34, has a real shot at picking up a second best actress Oscar.

Other films at this year’s fest were not as universally loved, although aspects of them were. It was very hard to find people who didn’t think that Annette Bening was out of this world as marathon swimmer Diana Nyad in Oscar-winning documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s narrative debut, Nyad (Netflix); I, for one, think the 65-year-old actress, who has been nominated and lost at the Oscars four times over the past 33 years, is now the best actress frontrunner.

Meanwhile, the fest produced at least three bona fide best actor contenders. In addition to Rustin’s outstanding Domingo, whom people love onscreen and off, there’s Paul Giamatti, who plays a hardened boarding school teacher in The Holdovers (Focus), which reunites him with his Sideways collaborator Alexander Payne and could bring him the best actor nom of which he was robbed for his performance in that film 19 seasons ago. And there’s Fleabag’s “hot priest” Andrew Scott, who really popped for his turn as a gay man who supernaturally reconnects with his dead parents in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (Searchlight).

KEEGAN Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders (20th Century) landed the coveted Patron’s Preview screening slot. The movie is an ode to a certain brand of all-American tough guys, but mostly attracted praise, including yours, for its female star, Jodie Comer. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, meanwhile, was a reliable festival argument starter. As with Fennell’s Oscar-winning debut, 2020’s Promising Young Woman, Saltburn has a distinctive point of view and a beloved actor at its center, in this case Barry Keoghan, who utterly commits to his character. But not everybody at Telluride was up for the Amazon movie’s over-the-top flourishes. The Oxford-set class satire may fare better next month as the opening-night film of BFI London.

FEINBERG Good point. But, at the same time, one thing that I was reminded of this weekend was to not to make assumptions about how certain demographics of people will react to certain films. Case in point: I assumed that Saltburn would play much better with younger people than with older people, given how risqué it is. But it turns out the film’s biggest champion in town was my friend of a certain age, veteran publicist Gary Shapiro, a longtime Telluride attendee and one of the most social Academy members, who was proselytizing about the film to everyone he knows.

KEEGAN It was interesting to listen to the chatter about some of the biopics that featured complicated subjects, like Wildcat, about writer Flannery O’Connor, who both skewered in her work and sometimes embodied in her private correspondence the values of the Jim Crow South. Wildcat is one of the fest’s acquisition titles, and whichever distributor buys it will have to figure out how to market that nuance. Meanwhile, Nyad was hit with a gut punch on the first day of the festival, in the form of a long Los Angeles Times piece that lays out the swimmer’s history of sometimes exaggerating her accomplishments. When I asked Chin and Vasarhelyi about that, they told me they acknowledge it in the film in scenes where Foster’s character chides Nyad about it. “This film is not about a record,” Vasarhelyi said. “It’s about a woman who wakes up at 60 and realizes she’s not done.” These kinds of stories can cast a pall over a film during awards season, but it feels worth noting that anybody interesting enough to make a movie about is going to have some flaws.

FEINBERG Absolutely. Plus, Academy members are supposed to evaluate the merits of a film or a performance, not the character of the person who inspired a film. People have won Oscars for playing Idi Amin, Aileen Wuornos, Claus von Bülow and Henry VIII. Was the Academy endorsing those individuals and everything that they ever did? I think not.

As always, some of the strongest films at the fest were non-English-language titles that had already premiered abroad but had not previously been shown stateside. In addition to the aforementioned Cannes darlings Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, Telluride screened the German master Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (Neon), for which Kôji Yakusho won Cannes’ best actor prize in recognition of his quietly moving portrayal of a Tokyo toilet cleaner. We learned during the fest that it has been chosen by Japan as its best international feature Oscar submission over an acclaimed film directed by a Japanese filmmaker, Monster from Hirokazu Kore-eda, who is best known for the Cannes winner Shoplifters.

Then there was The Taste of Things (IFC), formerly known as The Pot-au-Feu, a tremendously romantic and hunger-inducing movie about master chefs (played by real-life exes Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel), for which the Vietnamese-born French filmmaker Tran Anh Hùng won Cannes’ best director prize. France seems to have a very tough call on their hands, as far as whether to submit Anatomy of a Fall or The Taste of Things as its Oscar entry.

And one other that I have to mention is the film that Germany has already designated as its Oscar representative, 2015 Student Academy Award winner Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge (Sony Classics), which is a heart-pounding drama about theft in an elementary school and the teacher (Leonie Benesch) whose efforts to stop it lead to chaos. Numerous high-profile festival attendees were wowed by the film, and Sony Classics co-chief Michael Barker told me that he now intends to push it for recognition in categories in which non-English-language work doesn’t often compete, including best actress and best original screenplay. I think it should not be underestimated.

KEEGAN Last year was the year of the documentary at Telluride, which was partly a reflection of the strength of the nonfiction field and partly a side effect of the pandemic production slowdown. There were far fewer this year, though, right?

FEINBERG To be sure — but there were still a lot of very good ones. Among those that are first rate: The Pigeon Tunnel (Apple TV+), which Telluride regular/Oscar winner Errol Morris built around interviews he conducted with the late author John le Carré; Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ The Mission (Nat Geo), about a young Evangelical missionary who sought to convert the inhabitants of a remote island; and Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia (Roadside), which centers on a South Korean pastor and the people he has tried to help escape from North Korea. Also, one of the hottest sales titles of the fest was Oscar nominee Matthew Heineman’s aforementioned American Symphony, which I hear has multiple suitors and could close a deal with one of them at any moment, and has the potential to reshape this year’s best doc race.

KEEGAN I made a point of checking out some of the other films that are seeking distribution, like the Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn taxicab-set two hander Daddio from first-time filmmaker Christy Hall. Johnson produced through her company, TeaTime Pictures, and recruited Penn, her Malibu neighbor, by walking the script over to his house. The result is one of Penn’s most appealing performances in years — warm and rascally, with his expressive, deeply lined face impeccably lit by DP Phedon Papamichael.

I was also really moved by Louis-Dreyfus’ foray into drama in first-time director Daina Oniunas-Pusic’s Tuesday, which A24 hasn’t dated yet and may well end up being a 2024 title. It’s a real reinvention for the Seinfeld and Veep star.

FEINBERG The Telluride Film Festival, of course, always overlaps with the Venice Film Festival, in terms of dates if not films. What have you been hearing from the Lido?

KEEGAN A number of titles seem to be popping there, at least with critics, including Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (Netflix), Michael Mann’s Ferrari (Neon) and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (A24), all of which will have their North American premieres at the New York Film Festival in a few weeks.

Ava DuVernay’s Origin, which Neon acquired this morning, is set to screen at Venice on Sept. 6, and then at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11. I know you’re headed to TIFF later this week. Which films that will be screening there are on your to-see list?

FEINBERG I’m very excited to see Origin, as well as the TIFF opener The Boy and the Heron (GKIDS), the latest from the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. I also hope to catch Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money (Sony), which boasts a great ensemble; Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction (Amazon), starring Jeffrey Wright; the Nicolas Cage vehicle Dream Scenario (A24); Taika Waititi’s long-gestating Next Goal Wins (Disney); Maggie Betts‘ The Burial (Amazon), which stars Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones; Alex Gibney’s three-and-a-half-hour Paul Simon doc In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon (still seeking U.S. distribution); and James Hawes’ One Life (still seeking U.S. distribution), in which Anthony Hopkins plays Holocaust hero Nicholas Winton.

KEEGAN As I head back to L.A., and to reality, I can’t stop thinking about the question I was asked most frequently this weekend: When are the strikes finally going to end? Truly, no one seemed to know. There were some moments that felt like a thaw, however. When I showed up to Lucasfilm president Kathy Kennedy and producer Frank Marshall’s annual party, a paper was tacked outside the door that read, “Switzerland.” And inside, there were indications that we were indeed in neutral territory, as execs from AMPTP member companies mingled with members of striking guilds, many having come straight from a screening of Rustin. The town has been waiting for a Lew Wasserman-like figure to swoop in and bring the studios and the guilds together. But maybe progress toward a deal will start more incrementally, at small gatherings like this one. People did seem to agree at least on one thing: This year’s Telluride lineup, the first to reflect the full resumption of production since the outbreak of COVID-19, was exceptionally strong. Cinema had survived that extraordinary blow. The question is, can it survive another?

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