As another fest draws to a close, The Globe’s intrepid reporters have seen it all. Here, they share some moments they’ll definitely remember
That time Michael Moore got fancy
It’s moments like this that give Michael Moore his label of Champagne Socialist. The home video division of Warner Bros. brought Moore into town for a screening of Roger & Me, his landmark 1989 doc about the downward spiral of Flint, Mich., after General Motors closed its factories there. Being a Hollywood studio, Warners likes to splash out on its events, so it arranged to put up some of the talent on its TIFF films at the high-end Shangri-La Hotel.
“It’s, like, $700 a night for the room. I said, ‘I can’t – I don’t want to stay there,’” he told me in an interview. “So I went ahead and got a room at the Hyatt ... and they were like ‘No no no!’ Because to them, it was like, ‘We can’t have somebody at the Hyatt!’ I said, ‘But it’s a Canadian Hyatt, it’ll be nice! It’s not, like, Motel 6.”
But then, Moore says, he found out two people from Flint who worked on Roger & Me decided to make the trek to Toronto for the screening. “So I gave them my room at the Hyatt. And I said to Warners, ‘I need a room! Because now the Hyatt’s all sold out.
“And they said, ‘Well, we already paid for the Shangri-La...’” So he stayed there. Simon Houpt
That time a skype interview got REALLY intimate
When TV was new, some people worried that the screen might allow images of their living rooms to escape into the outside world. These days, we call that Skype, which I used to contact Belgian film director Fabrice Du Welz at his home to talk about his film Alleluia (playing at the Scotiabank Theatre Saturday at 9:15 p.m.).
Du Welz was describing some aspect of this poetically horrific true-crime drama when I heard the unmistakable sound of a toilet flushing in his apartment. It was a bit like being involved a deep conversation in a restaurant and hearing someone belch at the next table.
Neither of us acknowledged the sound. Du Welz may not even have noticed – it was a completely normal thing for him to hear in his shared living space, just not so normal to appear as punctuation during a trans-Atlantic interview.
In retrospect, hearing someone run a bath might have been more unsettling: In Alleluia, the two main characters use a tub while chopping up a body. Robert Everett-Green
That time Roger Waters was heckled (and heckled back)
At the premiere of Roger Waters The Wall at the Elgin Theatre, the barricades held back not only fans of the former Pink Floyd front man, but also hecklers who showed their displeasure with the English rocker and his recent denunciations of Israel’s modus operandi.
“Hey, Roger Waters, leave those Yids alone,” one sign read. The atmosphere was friendlier inside, where Waters received a halting version of Happy Birthday. “I’m 70 [bleeping] one years old!,” he shouted, cranky-like. Roger Waters The Wall documents his recent touring production of an epic rock album from 1979 that dealt with a rock star’s brick-by-brick alienation. The new film is presented as more of an anti-war statement. If The Wall has been repurposed, Waters was a revisionist onstage at the Elgin, where he referred to his former Floyd mates as “my much-loved old colleagues.”
At the end of their tenure together, Waters’s relationships with David Gilmour, Nick Mason and the late Richard Wright weren’t cozy, but perhaps time does heal wounds. When asked about his next project, the fiddle-fit septuagenarian declined to discuss. But an album of unearthed Pink Floyd music from the mid-1990s is set to be released soon, so perhaps a reunion with the surviving members is in the offing. Pigs have flown. Anything is possible. Brad Wheeler
That time Diane Keaton pulled me onto the red carpet
Red carpets are unruly beasts. Going in, you have no idea how celebrities will act. That said, aside from a thunderstorm lashing down on our flimsy plastic awning, the red carpet for Ruth & Alex started off fairly orderly.
Until Diane Keaton, wearing an impeccable white suit with a big, black hat, started wandering around like she was lost. All of a sudden, her gaze stopped, transfixed, on me.
“The colours!” she gleefully sang out. “Look at the colours. I want to show the world what you reporters look like.”
Before I knew what was going on, she was dragging me – and my bright orange dress, complete with a glob of bike grease on it – onto the red carpet, along with the reporter beside me, who was in a much fancier, fuchsia dress. There was a brief struggle between Keaton and a security guard as she pulled on my arm to get me onto the carpet, while the guard pushed me back into my assigned place. But eventually the 68-year-old actress won and a wet, dishevelled, stunned version of me was suddenly taking photos with one of the world’s biggest movie stars.
Later, I tried to understand how this happened. Was she drunk? Was she making fun of my admittedly shabby attire? Was she looking to cause some chaos? Then I realized Diane Keaton lives on her own planet. And in that weird world, Diane Keaton does whatever Diane Keaton wants. Madeleine White
That time babies (and parents) freaked me out
Festival-going can be an anxious experience, especially when every other movie you see takes some cute little baby and puts it in peril. In François Ozon’s melodramatic misfire The New Girlfriend, little Lucie is only six months old when her mother dies, leaving her attended by a father more interested in cross-dressing than bottle-feeding. In the creepy Hungry Hearts, a psychological thriller produced in English by the Italian director Saverio Costanzo, a young dad gradually realizes that his wife’s New Age theories and vegan diet are starving their seven-month-old boy.
Things got a lot more thoughtful in A Second Chance where the Danish director Susanne Bier juxtaposes the colicky but cherished baby of a middle-class police officer with the neglected infant of heroin addicts, and then plays with our prejudices about which child is abused. The policeman’s wife also exits the scene prematurely, leaving yet another dad looking after a baby solo in a movie trend that seems to speak to the parenting anxieties of the current generation’s increasingly engaged fathers.
Don’t worry, dads; that baby can’t possibly be starving: just look at the chubby arms and legs on the little charmer cast in the role. Kate Taylor
That time Bill Murray said yes
My TIFF epiphany came during a question-and-answer session following the free screening of Ghostbusters, when Bill Murray was asked by a star-struck young woman: “What’s it like to be you?”
That question might represent the unspoken essence of every celebrity interview but, usually, we learn to disguise it. I once heard a journalist ask the same question to the entire cast of Oceans 13, who made a couple of quips and hastily moved on. But Murray called it “a great question” and expanded on it by suggesting everyone in the audience contemplate it together:
“The only way you’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is to work your best, as often as you can, at being you, to practice being you, and remind yourself that that’s where home is.”
What grabbed me was, first, how Murray made the young woman feel at ease, and second, how he used a basic tenet of improv acting: that you always say “yes” or “yes and” to a premise, and never simply “no,” because that shuts down the creative process. Yes, and call me Molly Bloom, and yes, I went home and downloaded a book on the philosophy of improvisation, yes. Liam Lacey