By Eric Kohn
(Moving Pictures, Spring/Summer issue 2010)

Since the Tribeca Film Festival first joined the scene nine years ago, it has grappled with the challenge of cultivating a unique identity in a crowded field. While it won't escape those questions this year, Tribeca (April 21 – May 2) has a few new ingredients to distinguish it in 2010: Geoff Gilmore, the legendary festival guru who served as the director of Sundance for 20 years, joined the team as head of Tribeca Enterprises in early 2009. With him in this new role, Tribeca is following in the footsteps of other festivals by experimenting with day-and-date release strategies. Seven movies will become available on various cable partners at the same time they premiere at the festival. Meanwhile, a non-indie – DreamWorks Animation’s “Shrek Forever After” – has been tapped to open the festivities. In the following conversation, Gilmore and Nancy Schafer, the festival's executive director, discuss Tribeca's latest state.

Moving Pictures: What, if anything, gives a "Tribeca movie" its unique identity?
Nancy Schafer: We look for the best American and international cinema to show in our festival. It's hard to say there's a criteria, because it's the films we want to show, but obviously we know what New Yorkers and the industry have responded to in the past. We serve both those audiences, so we're looking for the strongest work we can show across the spectrum of film.
Geoff Gilmore: As someone who has programmed festivals for a long, long time — which isn't the role that I have here, by the way — you never start out with a narrow agenda when you start programming a festival. You have some ideas about the regional audience, and also the range of constituencies that a festival like Tribeca really services. Nancy has been very articulate in talking about how this is a festival that has a broader focus, nationally and internationally, than other big festivals in this country. It's always been set up with that kind of sensibility, so that the competition is a mix of national and international work.

Geoff Gilmore	Nancy Schafer

MP: Tribeca has a very specific place on the festival calendar, coming on the heels of Sundance and Berlin but a month ahead of Cannes. How does this timing play a role in the program?
Schafer: We start scouting for this festival in Toronto and we end at Berlin. [Tribeca programmers] David Kwok and Genna Terranova spend a lot of time scouring countries for work that has not shown anywhere. We have a very strong Irish showing this year. They also went to Paris and Montreal. We're looking for films that have not shown at festivals in addition to things that we think New Yorkers would like.
Gilmore: This is a festival that has both a populist sensibility to it and also a platform for discovery. It's probably second to none in terms of getting visibility for the work that shows here. It's really a marketing platform that showcases work that international filmmakers are dying to find. That's something I discovered with the films from last year that are just getting released into the marketplace.
Schafer: "City Island" and "The Eclipse" [which showed at Tribeca in 2009] are both out right now. It's an interesting little duo, because they're very different but are both well received.
Gilmore: That's one of the reasons why we've started these initiatives. The Virtual Film Festival is an outgrowth of what the festival is, a way of making Tribeca more of a national presence and opening it up to the consumer to see what a festival does. The old days of festivals are something we have to look at and say, "This doesn't quite work the same way." This whole idea of establishing a distribution platform is a way of looking at the feedback we've been getting from filmmakers over the years. They would come to us and say that the highest profile they ever had was when they were at a festival. That's the ideal opportunity here: to work hand-in-hand with different digital and cable operators in terms of helping get those films into the marketplace that are day-and-date releases as well. The key marketing platform in that is our founding partner, American Express. Nancy and I really bonked heads and argued about what we're doing here, and I think we've come up with a program that's an interesting spectrum, from documentary work to work that's international to stuff that has that indie stamp on it that will be fun for audiences. We're excited about these transactional VOD platforms we're latching onto, but also for the theatrical platforms we're doing at Tribeca and in Los Angeles — which Nancy's in the process of setting up.

MP: The role of VOD at major film festivals was unthinkable until very recently.
Gilmore: A lot of people considered it to be not our function. The idea was that you came to the festival, got your buzz, someone bought your film and then you came out to the marketplace, and everybody lived happily ever after. You know what? That isn't the state of the world anymore. Now it's all about finding visibility. Tribeca has really taken a step forward in terms of that focus.

MP: There are still plenty of filmmakers who want to find conventional theatrical distribution for their movies. Can Tribeca sustain this interest as well?
Schafer: Absolutely. The buyers that still exist are coming.
Gilmore: And excited, from what we hear.
Schafer: We have a lot of films in different brackets, so we expect a lot of films to be bought out of the festival, like we do every year. I think last year there were 33 films bought out of the festival. We had 80 films, so that's a pretty high percentage.

MP: How does the festival balance the tension between red carpet, celebrity-studded events and exposure for the smaller indie movies?
Schafer: I always feel that it's important to attract the international press, and one of the ways we do that is to premiere big studio films. That helps everybody's films get attention in the long run.
Gilmore: It's also part of the spectrum of what the festival has done. You know, Cannes showed "Shrek 2" a couple of years ago. This year, we're opening with "Shrek Forever After" because we thought that the conversation about 3-D was a good thing to kick the festival off with. Besides, it is a film that's both entertaining and full of film references — a very sophisticated kind of work that's the best of what you can do in any kind of genre. But you also have indie work here that people can discover, which is one of the things that Tribeca focuses on as a community. It also has this wonderful drive-in aspect, which is purely for the community — three films on the edge of Manhattan, people watching a huge screen. There's this mixture of agendas, but it services the New York community extremely well and underscores what we're trying to do by expanding the Tribeca agenda to be very much like the Toronto International Film Festival — to have a populist sensibility and industry agenda, but also service its own community. I think that's the vein we're operating in.

MP: This year's Sundance adopted the motif of "cinematic rebellion." Geoff, since this was your first year away from the festival, how do you feel about this idea?
Gilmore: I think the way some of that was worded wasn't at the root of what's going on. We are at the moment of a huge transformation. It feels like there's a new era in terms of how films will be released and seen. We have a much more established international arena right now. Obviously, the technology that has affected filmmaking has really taken hold, both in the 3-D arena and in terms of the digital impact in general. This idea that you have to be somehow in opposition to something isn't what we're talking about here. We're really trying to figure out the pathways for where the future's going.

MP: How do you divide your attention between the needs of the local audience and the larger national and industry interests?
Schafer: We do want to encourage everyone to come to the festival, but we live in a very forgiving city where people are open to all kinds of experiences. With the competition, we try to feature the strongest cinematic work.

MP: Can you highlight some of your favorites?
Schafer: "The Arbor," in documentary competition, is one of the most cinematic films of the festival. "Sons of Perdition" is a very strong storytelling film. In the narrative competition, "Paju" is very good.
Gilmore: "Lucky Life" and "Beware the Gonzo" are terrific.
Schafer: There's also "My Brothers," an amazing Irish film, one of four at the festival. They're all very strong.

MP: Both Alex Gibney's untitled Eliot Spitzer documentary and Michael Winterbottom's "The Killer Inside Me" seem to invite controversy. Did this play a role in your programming decisions?
Gilmore: You don't choose films because of their controversy. You choose films because you think there's something to discuss there, something you can be passionate about. It's not about the elitist membership of a world defined only by auteurist art cinema. What Michael Winterbottom tries to do makes for a conversation that's worth taking place. If you only show a film because of controversy, you're in the media business. We're not in the media business. We care about film culture.

MP: Are there films this year that are well positioned for big sales?
Schafer: I think "Beware the Gonzo" is going to do quite well here.
Gilmore: I think so, too, but you know what? Nobody predicts big sales anymore. We just want to see sales, period.
Schafer: Right. I don't think the world is doing big sales anymore.

MP: For a few years now, many filmmakers looked at festivals as a replacement for their theatrical run. Do you think the VOD initiative applies a formal model to this tendency?
Schafer: I think you've just hit the nail on the head. It's about how to use the festival as a marketing platform to help filmmakers. This is one of the first ideas we came up with.
Gilmore: We've been in a universe for decades where theatrical has driven everything. It's now a much bigger dynamic to talk about how digital will drive theatrical. How can the marketing of something take place in a number of different arenas simultaneously? That's one of the things we're looking at. Our partners in the cable world were very excited that this would go on during the festival; that they could go to their consumers and say, "Look, you can access the festival as if you were there." That opens up the possibilities for showcasing work in a VOD marketplace that can be followed up with something in the theatrical world, and those things can be augmented with a marketing platform established through American Express. It's a big cash infusion and all through non-recoupable work.
Schafer: Geoff is talking about how American Express is trying to support the whole platform through advertising. In a traditional model, the print and advertising costs would be recouped through back end, but since they're spending their own money on media, it's free money for the films.
Gilmore: So we end up reinventing what festivals have come to do. We feel like we're moving in the right direction. We understand that you don't just build it and hope they come; you've got to build it and market the hell out of it.

MP: But the definition of "marketing" has changed drastically depending on the scale of a movie.
Gilmore: When we went to Comcast and our other partners, we sat with them to structure deals that would be marketed by them, so that we knew this would be successful. We're looking to develop an audience and reach out to people who can really cross over from watching American independent films to watching, maybe, an international film that they're not as used to seeing. This isn't an elitist festival about "what you have to see." It's about encouraging people to try things out and see what they like. I always say, "Expand the sense of the possible."
Schafer: We want all of our filmmakers to find an audience.
Gilmore: At a festival, filmmakers are really getting to show their work to real people. When you come out of that, you have a sense of how to get it out to people. I think we'll have people come back to us in years to come to say they see Tribeca as a means of reaching out to audiences and finding them.

Photos courtesy Tribeca Film Festival

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