In starting to learn about film festivals and what were good ones - 'cause there are five billion of them - it was just a really good East Coast festival. And I thought this little movie was an East Coast film.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you get to bring a little movie on the festival circuit, it's a nice experience because you get to see it with an audience. People who go to festivals to watch films are usually a little more eager to enjoy them. It's exciting because it's like you're going to the film's opening night at every festival.
The whole idea of a festival to me is that filmmakers get to interact. You see someone strolling, you get to meet them and tell them you like their work, you admire their story.
Toronto Film Festival is one of those festivals where there are 400 movies, and unless you have a distributor who is super confident and puts a lot of money into it, sometimes movies can go unwatched or unnoticed.
I love festivals because I feel like I'm more of a movie fan than a person who's in the film industry.
But I really felt that, something about the lights going down, and the sense of community. I saw this movie at one festival, and there were 1700 people.
It was just crazy opportunity to see that whole world and the competitions that we had in the film, like Long Beach, it was just crazy and so much fun. I felt like I lived all those moments in the movie.
Cannes or any other major festival is basically an animal in its own nature, creating very specific perceptions of films in a moment.
My parents used to do these little film festivals in our house where we'd watch all the Marx Brothers movies, or Chaplin movies, and a lot of westerns.
Cannes is the oldest film festival in the world, and I've long dreamed of having one of my films there in competition. It's a dream that lay dormant for a long time; I stopped believing in it.
I don't know what it was, maybe the movie theaters in my immediate surrounding neighbourhood in Burbank, but I never saw what would be considered A movies.