The Best Films at Sundance, Safdie Brothers Drama, & Guest Roger Durling, executive director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

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0:35welcome to screen talk and do wires weekly podcast bringing you up to speed on what's going on in the film industry i'm ann thompson at the last sundance film festival being held

0:45Ryan Lattanzio:in park city utah and i'm ryan latanzio back in new york after covering the first half of sundance where of course i was for the final edition of park city i sound a little froggy at the moment. I think I'm either a little sick or had too much fun at the Synetic party. I don't know. It's a good one. It always is. That's the best party at Sundance every year. It's Monday night and I have fond memories. It's like a hiccup in the middle where a lot of things have happened. There's a lot of deal-making in progress and people relax and enjoy themselves. So obviously we're going to talk about the festival and what we've seen so far.

1:26Ryan Lattanzio:And then we're also going to look back at some of the awards developments this week, like the BAFTAs. Also, there's a bit of a poison meme that has emerged from the new Page Six in Hollywood, the California Post. So we're going to talk about that and what it had to say about the Safdie brothers later today. But first, Anne, we had to take a little pause in Sundance to look at the BAFTA nominations. What was your take? Well, the BAFTAs are actually really important because they represent, in a way, the 24 % of the academy that are international voters, or at least they give us a sign of where things are going.

2:09So again, we have one battle after another leading the way with 14 noms, and then you have the sinners coming right behind with 13 and then Hamnet. We knew Hamnet would do well because it's sort of a home team advantage there. And then we have Marty Supreme. And this is the same group of films that have been dominating all along. The fact that Guillermo del Toro did not get in is another sign, of Frankenstein not being in that front pack. It's going to make lots of noise in the crafts, I would suggest. What's your take?

2:52Ryan Lattanzio:Well, I noticed that the BAFTAs gave one more nomination to One Battle than Sinners, so it didn't quite follow in the pattern of the Oscars. These are obviously both American-themed movies, so that was definitely interesting. And obviously they went for some of these younger actors at the Academy. Didn't invite, nominate this year. Odessa A. Zion got in there. Yeah. And Paul Meskel. Actually, Odessa A. Zion is, she's a bit in the news at the moment because she was cast in a Sean Durkin movie in this movie called Deep Cuts where the, it's based on a book where the character is half Jewish, half Mexican.

3:33Ryan Lattanzio:And so, people on the internet came for her. She qualifies for half of it, right? Jewish, yes. not the other half, though, even despite some of her personal styling may suggest some ambiguity there that is she is not Mexican. Well, the part that I thought was sort of too bad was that she said, well, I accepted the part without having read the book. And I was like, oh, you know, maybe you should do your homework. I guess that was my reaction. No, that was a bit green of her, I have to say, though. I know actors, you probably get handed things all the time and you have no idea what it is and you just say yes to an audition.

4:10Ryan Lattanzio:But yeah, I think now she's learned her lesson and will approach her next role more thoughtfully. But back to the BAFTAs. Also, we saw Chase Infinity get in there and we did not. But this year, the BAFTAs are after the Oscars. So it's like, it's really more a question. I mean, that's nice for Paul Meskel. I thought he would get in and it's nice for her. But I also think that in this case, we're kind of looking at where is it going to affect the actual Oscar wins? Who's going to get the momentum? And right now, it is interesting to look at those three. All right. The question of what the impact of that Tatiana Siegel's story will have is actually in the story, in the Oscar story, because she writes about let's do it let's just do this the josh safdy movie good times and ben benny they wrote they did it together he was apparently behind the camera as as the as the director and benny was taking care of the boom mic in a scene with an underage actress which they did not realize at the time who was basically confronted with um a naked man you know uh across this guy was like a shady guy that they hired off the street.

5:34Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, the actor. Well, he's been in some other Safdie movies. His name is Buddy Duress, but he's kind of a non-professional actor at this point with a criminal record, mind you. So this was, do you want to elaborate further on what he actually did in that? He freaked her out completely. Well, allegedly he exposed himself to her in this scene. This is a 17-year-old actress who's cast to play a prostitute in a scene that involved nudity and sex, with some elements of this allegedly being unsimulated. And she came out of it basically saying she was traumatized. And the incident or details of the incident resurfaced in 2023, allegedly.

6:19Ryan Lattanzio:And that's when the Safdies were saying, you know, we didn't know she was underage. Whether or not that's true, I don't know. And then the blame was kind of shifted to the producer, Sebastian Baird McClard, who also in 2023 was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. All right. So this is one of those things. This happens every once in a while where you read a story. Now, Tatiana Siegel is a reputable reporter. She's been at the trades for decades. I know her. I worked with her. I know that she's a good, tough reporter. But this story is so full of unattributed sources, people who are anonymous, people who are quoted behind the scenes.

7:05And a lot of a friend of him has said this and a friend of his said that. Not that many sources, I might add. And then you don't have the two players. And she's making it out that because of this incident, that is the reason that the two brothers became estranged, apparently. Now, I saw them together many times during the awards season, especially at the Governor's Awards. They seemed friendly enough. I mean, you can always put on a show, but they went their separate ways in terms of directing. So I don't know where this all falls down in terms of what really happened. Did you have the same reaction, Ryan?

7:50Ryan Lattanzio:I did. And some of it was a bit of a nothing burger, as they say, especially because I think that some of the story has been going around for a couple of years. And the timing of it makes me feel like it's a studio-planted story in some ways or by somebody else. It's the timing. It's the timing. It's designed to take down a movie that's coming on strong at this moment. But the impact would be on the directing race. And I don't actually think that Safdie is going to be, you know, one of the he's not going to be the winner in the directing race anyway. I don't think. No. And I don't know how much of the story is going to penetrate the larger culture.

8:32Ryan Lattanzio:It's actually surprising to me that it was the cover story of this first edition of California Post, because I'm not sure a lot of people who read page six even know who the Safdies are. And, you know, think about this that I mean, and you you've covered the Oscars for a long time. You've seen smear campaigns in history where these sort of anonymous concerns are leaked to the press or old controversies are resurfaced. A lot of these obviously came in the Weinstein era, you know, 15 years ago or so. So this is not to legitimize these claims, but there was all these sexual harassment allegations against Casey Affleck that resurfaced during voting season.

9:08Ryan Lattanzio:He won anyway. Yeah. So I think what I'm trying to say is that the timing on these things can appear exploitative. Yeah. I remember when the Russell Crowe movie that Ron Howard directed. What's it called? Beautiful Mind. Beautiful Mind. I remember when Beautiful Mind had a whole thing going on right around the time that the movie was being voted on. It was a little late and it didn't have any impact. You know, it did well at the Oscars. But the question here, I mean, the most recent campaign, it turned out that these are legitimate concerns, was Amelia Perez, which was poised. At this point in time, in the Oscar race, it had the most nominations.

9:56Carla Garcia Gascon was poised to be the best actress winner. There was a lot going on there. Jaco Diarro was in the race. And then the whole thing fell apart completely, completely demolished. And Zoe Saldana was the survivor, basically. Yeah.

10:14Ryan Lattanzio:These things are often coming out of bad faith, but then they turn out to be legitimate. That one was legitimate. Although, you know, why did that journalist find these claims when they did? You know, it's an interesting question. Anyway, this happens every year. And I don't know if this is going to have an impact on him or not. But again, I don't think he was planning. I don't think he was about to win Best Director anyway. And I don't think it'll have an impact on any of the other categories. Do you? No. As we've just pointed out in history, these things don't really have an impact other than the one from last year.

10:51Okay. All right. So then we go to Sundance. Tell me, what's your take on Sundance so far? We were ships passing in the night.

11:01Ryan Lattanzio:So between the platform, priest greetings, and what I saw on the ground, which is probably 20 to 25 movies so far, and I planned a marathon quite a few more over the weekend, even though there's already been some attrition on the platform with the removal of the film Chasing Summer by Josephine Decker, which I actually gave a rather tepid review to. You were tough on that film. I was, but other people were as well. Well, let's come back to that one. But I think overall it was one of the weaker lineups in my Sundance experience, unfortunately. But I think the the elegiac air in Park City, you know, may certainly made it a memorable one because there are a lot of wonderful tributes shared of, you know, all the years that the 40 plus years that the festival has been in the city.

11:49Ryan Lattanzio:So that really kind of took over, I think, regardless of the quality of some of the movies, some of the there were some major disappointments. a Kathy Yan film called The Gallerist, which was horrible, starring Natalie Portman and Jen Ortega and Divine Joy Randolph. Really good cast. You didn't like the moment, did you? The moment is disappointing also and I think will only be meaningful to fans of Charlie XCX, who I don't even necessarily see coming out in theaters to see the movie, which opens today, as of when this podcast runs on January 30th. She was supposed to be the It Girl because she had several films, but the one who turned out to be the It Woman was Olivia Wilde.

12:36Ryan Lattanzio:Olivia Wilde did make a bit of a comeback, as we know. Don't Worry Darling sort of queried with some of her abilities, and people were hard on that movie, and there was a lot of tabloid controversy surrounding her. I don't even need to rehash it. But she wrote and directed The Invite, which won by A24 in a huge bidding war, which is a movie starring Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde herself, Penelope Cruz, and Edward Norton as two couples that are gearing up to possibly engage in a foursome. and as a gay man who understands the ins and outs of polyamory to a degree, I found this movie to be rather basic, but I think it'll play well for the audience that this movie is for is probably Gen Xers and maybe even some boomers.

13:31Ryan Lattanzio:I think it will be meaningful to them. The question is do these people go out and go to the theater and merit the eight-figure spend that A24 put down on the movie? I think this is a 10 million plus buy. And just about every single distributor was in the mix, reportedly, which is nice to see. I mean, they all got in there. They were all trying to get the movie. And A24 prevailed, but they had to pay. They had to cough up. And that's a lot of money for a little movie. But that's the movie that came out of the festival with the biggest imprimatur. You know, it just had the most buzz of anything.

14:12Ryan Lattanzio:So the other Olivia Wilde movie was that she starred in Greg Araki's I Want Your Sex, which is a return to form for the director who has not made a feature since 2014's White Bird in a Blizzard, though he's directed a lot of TV since then. this movie stars an excellent Cooper Hoffman as an assistant at a gallery where Olivia Wilde is the gallerist and engages in a somewhat predatory BDSM relationship with him where she is the dom and he is the sub and the two actors are just great together the movie itself it's a little cheaper looking and cheaper feeling I think than some of my favorite beloved Iraqi movies but those actors have great chemistry and everybody on the ground loved her performance.

14:56Can't wait. Can't wait to see these. It's I get terrible FOMA when I'm not there. It's it's a terrible feeling to read every Sundance review. And then you have your your studio and your interviews and everybody else has theirs. And it's just but I'm here now. I'm here now. And I'm having fun. Josephine is the next movie.

15:18Ryan Lattanzio:It's Beth G. R. O. Joe. And she's already directed before. This is not her first feature. But I watched this one on the portal. The press gets to watch things on the portal a day early. This is a very good movie. This is a very strong drama. And I was very caught up in it and very upset by it. because it's not an obvious situation where somebody's bad and somebody's good. It's a family where everybody's intentions are good, but they're not looking after their little girl. So the little girl, eight years old, witnesses by happenstance a rape in the park. And it's horrible and violent, and she knows it.

16:03She absolutely recognizes that. And eventually she emerges from behind a tree and the guy runs off and the police, her father finds her and the police come. And the father is played very, very well, I think. I think it's one of his best performances by Channing Tatum. The mother is Gemma Chan, who's also very good. And the dynamics of the family play very accurately, I think. And the little girl is acting out. She's upset. They don't know what to do to help her. And the father's a rather authoritarian guy. It's fascinating. I was very taken with it. What about you, Ryan?

16:45Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I love this movie. That screening that I was in at the Eccles for this movie, people were dead silent. That movie totally had everyone in the palm of its hand. It's extremely upsetting. It's almost like a horror movie. This filmmaker really, I think, uses a number of horror tropes. I mean, there's even horror tropes. There's even kind of jump scares and hallucinatory moments in it. Well, she's got the guy sort of in her life. Yeah, the little girl sees the rapist. He's in her room. He's in her house. He's on the street. It's very disturbing. Yeah, he's played by Phil Ettinger, and it's a totally nonverbal performance, and he's just sort of there as this looming, horrifying presence.

17:29Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, this is a great movie, and I am predicting it's going to win, if not the Grand Jury Prize, I think the Grand Jury Prize and maybe another award, or at least direct, or something, it's going to win a significant award. And I there hasn't been a sale announced yet, but I know that a number of people are looking at it. So as of Friday, the awards will be announced Friday morning. And so we'll know we'll know what they are. And then Friday brings also a day of remembrance where, you know, I've been enjoying also the way you have all these tributes and people on Facebook. And I know you're not on Facebook, but the boomers are on Facebook.

18:09And everybody from my generation has been, you know, attending Sundance for years. They're all sharing their their remembrances. And and so I'm going to participate in this thing tomorrow and see what I come up with to to commemorate the festival. It is a set. Everybody seems to be on the same page, though. There's something sad about it. And even the town, there's no snow. right so it's like it's just gotten cold enough so that they can make snow um it is it's it's interesting that they you know i think the town is is like oh maybe we made a mistake here because when there's no snow the festival keeps the keeps the coffers flowing but anyway the the the festival had no control over all the locals and how much they were gouging uh the attendees And so now it's time for Boulder.

19:08And everybody's ready. Everybody is on, you know, I can feel it, that it's onward to Boulder. And that's a good thing. Now, what other movies did you like?

19:18Ryan Lattanzio:The other movies that I like, there is one movie that Neon bought called Leviticus. It's not a perfect film, but the emotions that it elicits are there. It is a queer horror movie out of Australia. It's Mia Vosikowska's in it. We hardly ever see her anymore. I haven't seen her in a while. Yeah. She doesn't do Hollywood anymore. She only does movies in Australia or that are an Australian production for a number of reasons. And this is about two young boys that are subjected to a conversion therapy cult that basically makes it so that they are stalked by an apparition of the person that they desire the most.

20:01Ryan Lattanzio:And in this case, it's each other. So it's almost like a gay version of It Follows. And it's very moving. It's very exciting. And whatever this director does next, I think, will be really great. Well, one movie we both saw was a follow-up to The Fire of Love, which was a Saradosa documentary about these two obsessed volcanologists who chased volcanoes and eventually met their death at the hand of one volcano. A great movie that Nat Geo bought. in 2022. So this year, she came to the festival with Time and Water about a dying glacier in Iceland. And she used a similar narrative technique. This time, the poet activist, Andre Magnuson, and he's a very effective narrator.

20:54And he's talking about his own family. He had archives of his grandparents on various glaciers back in the day when they were just huge expanses that were going to go on forever. And no one ever thought in terms of anything bad happening. So this is about the first little glacier to die. And I found the movie very effective. How about you, Ryan?

21:17Ryan Lattanzio:uh i this movie for me uh it was a very sort of beautiful collage to experience but i felt that there was too much poetic extrapolation between the story of the grandparents and the story of the glaciers this idea that he held a funeral for a dying glacier i thought was such a beautiful central metaphor and a place a launch pad from which to make his explorations but i was more invested in the natural beauty aspects of the documentary than who i didn't understand really who the grandparents were or why I needed to care about them quite as much. Whereas in Fire of Love, I felt like I really understood this romance that the movie really burrowed you inside.

21:53Ryan Lattanzio:I don't know that this movie quite succeeds on that level of emotion, but the use of music, the editing, the cinematography, those elements are all very beautiful. So it was certainly a transportive, you know, a beautiful experience. And Nat Geo has it again. So it will be shown. and I think it's likely to be one of the Oscar contenders at the end of the day. So what happens at Sundance? I know you said it was a tough Sundance, but the truth of the matter is every year there's five or ten movies, five docs, five narratives that really emerge. It isn't a big number, and very few movies get distributed.

22:33So this is typical, as far as I can tell, from the outside, but we shall see. All right. I want to introduce our special guest, Roger Derling. the director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. We've had him on the cast before. And stay tuned and we'll learn what they're up to this year.

22:57Hi, Roger.

22:58Ryan Lattanzio:Morning. Hello, Roger. So, Roger, bring us up to speed on what this year's Santa Barbara International Film Festival is going to bring us. I always look forward to all the tributes and the award galas that you have. Maybe we could start there. Well, the biggest thing is that we just, you know, we acquired a year ago a multiplex in downtown Santa Barbara. And in time for the festival, we are opening the film center and we spend$21 million and the grand opening is next week to coincide. And we're going to run a year round, you know, like an art house, like the film forum in New York City. And we're going to program nonstop throughout the year, showing independent cinemas, foreign film, retrospectives, documentaries, family programming.

23:57And the festival will take place in this venue as well. Are you still going to use the other venues? Arlington, of course. I mean, because this, I mean, the Arlington is a 2000 seater. And for the big events like you hosting Stellan Skarsgård, 2000 is the right, the right, you know, venue for, you know. Yeah, we're actually almost all the events are sold out. Well, the point is, is that you've built sort of like Toronto, you know, you've built a cinephile community. So you actually have a group of people who are probably going to go to that theater. Correct. Yeah, year round. And, you know, we already have one.

24:41I don't think you've ever been to it. We have in Montecito, we have a one screen art house. It's called the Riviera Theater. And we run that year round and it definitely taught us that we can, in this community, we can have a very healthy art house throughout the year. But, you know, we still need the other venues like the Arlington, which, you know, you'll be hosting the writers panel there and you'll also be doing the honors with Stellan Skarsgård. I am looking forward to that. He is, he is, I've been watching all of his red carpet and his different interviews and everything. He's a hoot. He's a hoot.