What do you make after winning best picture? Toronto’s audiences are finding out
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TORONTO — Hello, Los Angeles Times readers and welcome to the first of our daily newsletters out of the Toronto International Film Festival. We’re tracking all the buzz out of TIFF’s 51st edition.
In the coming days, this dispatch will be saturated with studio portraits of stars and directors, video interviews about the hottest films, critical diaries with first reads on notable titles and our daily recommendations of movies to see that night.
We begin with a bona-fide world premiere, the first film from Siân Heder since her “CODA” took three Oscars including best picture in 2022.
She won Hollywood’s highest honor. So why was making her next film so hard?
Her Oscar ceremony was overshadowed by the Slap, but by night’s end, Siân Heder and “CODA” had prevailed, winning best picture, best supporting actor (for Troy Kotsur) and best adapted screenplay for Heder’s script.
It was a glorious moment and a historic one: the first streaming title to win best picture. (Netflix had come close a couple of times but Apple TV ended up at the podium first.)
What should have foretold a meteoric run for Heder, though, became a tricker road, as she pursued daring projects and found funding difficult.
Our Mark Olsen sat down with Heder for a wide-ranging interview on several topics, including the asterisk that some would (unfairly) add to her pandemic-era win.
“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says of “CODA’” and its Oscar triumph with an edge of defiance. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story.”
Heder also discusses the making of her new film, “Being Heumann,” which opened Toronto last night at a gala screening that drew emotional responses.
Here’s what we’re watching today
‘The Stunt Driver’
Montreal-born stunt driver Ken Carter, a.k.a. “The Mad Canadian,” didn’t respect books, cops, Evel Knievel — and possibly his own life.
That paranoia, plus hellbent Canadian pride, rumbles through Michael Dowse’s bleakly comic biopic about Carter’s determination to land a mile-long jump across the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental.
Even Knievel (Ben Foster) thinks it’s a dumb idea. “I have said it a hundred times times: Evel Knievel is a nerd,” Jay Baruchel’s Carter yelps.
Carter didn’t live long enough to see this salute to his reckless bravery, but I suspect he’d be touched by the detailed sincerity of Baruchel’s performance, from dark goatee to foolhardy goals. — Amy Nicholson
‘The Face of Horror’
It has been 10 years since filmmaker Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch,” a stylish invocation of witchcraft and a repudiation of misogyny — which makes her new “The Face of Horror” (part of Toronto’s much-beloved Midnight Madness section) among the festival’s more anticipated world premieres.
An adaptation of a classic Japanese ghost fable transposed into a Hammer-style British gothic tale, the film promises Biller’s signature evocative style — she serves as director, writer, producer, editor and costume designer — as if you are watching some unearthed artifact from another era or even a parallel dimension.
In a story of marital betrayal and otherworldly revenge, with a handful of better-known actors including Kristine Frøseth, Jonah Hauer-King and Bella Heathcote synching into Biller’s preferred idiosyncratic performance style, this should be among TIFF’s most genuinely unique experiences. — Mark Olsen
We’ll be back tomorrow with our first clips from the studio and more!
