TORONTO – At the Toronto International Film Festival, you never quite know what you’ll get: a tearful standing ovation, a chance encounter with a movie star in a dive bar or a bizarre screening mishap that becomes the stuff of legend.
Filmmakers, programmers and industry insiders have seen it all — and ahead of the festival’s 50th edition, they share their funniest, strangest and most nerve-racking stories from years on the circuit.
Piers Handling, former TIFF CEO
Moments before the 1995 premiere of acclaimed French filmmaker Claude Sautet’s drama “Nelly et M. Arnaud” at Roy Thompson Hall, Handling says he witnessed a side of the director unlike anything he had ever seen.
In the green room, he told Sautet in French that a few sponsored Canadian short films would be screened before the feature. Handling suspects something got lost in translation, because his comment seemed to set the director off.
“He was extremely nervous before the screening. And he had a unique way of letting off steam, which was literally running around the green room and bouncing off the walls and off couches. I’d never seen this behavior before. It was so weird and so bizarre,” he recalls.
Handling says nobody in the green room — including the French ambassador to Canada at the time — knew what to make of Sautet’s outburst.
“It was such childish behavior and no one could calm him down. We were just watching this guy running around the room.”
Handling was then called to the stage to introduce Sautet, unsure if the director would follow.
“I had no idea if he was actually going to come out on stage or if I would just be standing there alone when I introduced him,” he says.
“I went out, said my words, looked to my side, and there he was.” – Alex Nino Gheciu
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Charlene Coy, publicist
Coy handled a variety of films at TIFF over the last 23 years, among them young stars at pivotal moments in their careers, including Andrew Garfield, Denis Villeneuve and Robert Pattinson. But it is veteran screen star Lauren Bacall that leaves one of her most lasting memories, after Bacall visited TIFF for “The Walker” in 2007.
“The legendary star was famously afraid of flying, so she had a driver bring her and her dog from New York City to Toronto,” Coy says by email.
“She could be challenging, but we quickly developed a rapport, to the point where she trusted me with everything. In addition to the press and red carpet, she also asked me to sit with her for all her meals, take her shopping at Pusateri’s and Danier leather, and insisted I be her sole publicist for two full days.
“During that time, she shared personal stories, including photos of her children with Humphrey Bogart, and entrusted me with shipping her packages back to her Los Angeles home — a surreal experience I’ll never forget.” – Cassandra Szklarski
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Atom Egoyan, director
When Egoyan premiered his third film, “Speaking Parts,” at the 1989 Perspectives Canadian sidebar at the Uptown Theatre, the director nearly faced a catastrophe. The local lab that spliced the reels had mixed up the order. As a result, the TIFF audience saw the first reel jump straight to the third.
Stunned, the filmmaker asked the confused audience to sit tight while he raced home, across the city, to fetch an extra print.
“It was the most surreal moment: I was in a cab trying to convince the driver that I was not delusional, that there were 900 people waiting in a cinema for him to drive me to Broadview and Dundas so I could pick up a print,” Egoyan remembers.
But he says the most unbelievable part was that the audience sat patiently for over half an hour waiting for him to return.
“I came running back into the theatre with these film canisters and I was sweating like a pig. I was imagining I’d come back to an empty cinema,” he says.
“But then I heard people start to clap as they saw me run into the theatre. The air conditioning system had broken, too, but they stayed put.” – ANG
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Natasha Koifman, NKPR president
Koifman says 2013 was a particularly memorable year for a charity fundraiser she throws for Artists for Peace and Justice during TIFF. That year it took place at the home of Diane Bald and Roots co-founder Michael Budman and a constellation of Hollywood stars were in attendance, including Adrien Brody, Colin Firth and then-freshly linked couple Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis.
The backyard party-meets-auction took a soggy turn when actor Maria Bello pulled in a $20,000 bid by gamely leaping into the swimming pool, fully clothed in a designer suit and Louboutins.
“She was wearing this beautiful red Marc Jacobs suit that he custom made for her for TIFF,” recalls Koifman.
“She jumped right into the pool.”
A press release at the time adds that a member of Daniel Lanois’s band jumped in with Bello, swimming briefly before returning to dry land, but that pool hijinks didn’t end there.
A third guest took to the water when the auctioneers spotted an iPod at the bottom of the pool and pop graphic artist Peter Tunney leapt in to rescue the device. – Cassandra Szklarski
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Kazik Radwanski, director
While at TIFF in 2012 for the premiere of his debut “Tower,” Radwanski skipped the festival’s glitzier parties in favour of a Locarno Film Festival–hosted bash at tiny punk dive bar The Bovine Sex Club.
“Out of nowhere, Bill Murray walked into the party and everyone just kind of froze for a moment,” he says.
Murray slipped into the bar’s grimy back room and mingled.
“I remember everyone just kind of trying to be cool, but we were also like, ‘Holy crap, Bill Murray’s here.’”
As if the moment wasn’t surreal enough, Radwanski later saw acclaimed French actor Sandrine Bonnaire hit the dance floor — a far cry from the tattooed, leather-clad punks and metalheads who usually populated the venue.
“I was such a big fan of her films from the ’80s and then I saw her just dancing there. I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s her!’” – ANG
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Peter Mettler, director
Back in 1977, Mettler, then a film student at the school now known as Toronto Metropolitan University, says he became the festival’s sole chauffeur after a chance meeting with the organization’s director of hospitality. That year Henry Winkler came to the festival to promote the film “Heroes,” and it’s credited as TIFF’s first celebrity appearance. Mettler was tasked with driving him and his gaggle of bodyguards around in the festival’s Lincoln.
This was during Winkler’s turn as Fonzie in “Happy Days,” and he was a hot commodity.
“There’s hundreds of girls – young girls – and they’re literally going on the screen of the windshield. I have to drive one mile per hour as their hands are clamouring all over, like trying to get a look at the Fonz,” Mettler recalled.
The guards cleared the way for Mettler to drive through, and he parked the car after dropping off Winkler’s team. When he returned, the fans had tucked love notes into the Lincoln.
“Every little crack is full of love notes,” Mettler said. “It was incredible, the power of that kind of image and celebrity at the time.” – Nicole Thompson
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Tuesday, Sept. 2.
