Robert De Niro laughs beside actor Edward Norton during the news conference for the film Stone on Friday.MIKE CASSESE/Reuters
Stop the presses: Robert De Niro's in town, and he just said something very, very witty.
Well, no, actually. We don't stop the presses any more. The web and digital technologies have drastically changed the way The Globe covers the Toronto International Film Festival in the last couple of years.
The first big change was last year's launch of the TIFF Mob Blog, which aggregates the bits and bites coming in from our fleet of reporters covering the two-week festival. Globe Review's editors made it the main focus of our coverage, flowing virtually everything through it, and having the print version perform a different role as more of a round-up of what's been happening, and a place for in-depth profiles and trend stories.
The blog allows for two things that readers seem to want badly out of TIFF coverage: access and immediacy. TIFF unfolds very quickly, with dozens and dozens of screenings and several red-carpet appearances each day, while reporters trek from hotel room to hotel room what is, admittedly, fantastic access to the film world's stars. All of that can't wait for print these days.
Early on in this year's festival, I emerged from the busy hallways of the Park Hyatt hotel having just done interesting back-to-back interviews with director John Curran and actors Edward Norton and Milla Jovovich about their film Stone. Perched in the lobby was one of our competitors, tapping out a piece on Jovovich on his Mac. That's a great reminder that these days, every deadline is now.
There's Twitter, too. It's a great organizing tool - a great way to hear about screenings, find out where stars are, share tips and opinions, etc. - and a way to join the conversations readers are having about the festival. The #TIFF hashtag is so widely used, it's almost hard to keep up.
And then there's the new possibilities for video. Our photographers, and those from the wire services, have always done a great job of getting moving pictures of all the glamour and chaos. But this year, the Globe equipped some of us reporters with iPhones to shoot ambient video and to try and get as many of our interviewees as possible to answer the same one question in a film clip (essentially, what's one film that's really inspired you recently, or in your career?).
In past years, that might have been a fool's errand: film stars have been notoriously touchy about anything that wasn't pre-approved and scripted, and some still are. But I've personally noticed a softening this year to the idea that video is everywhere, and it's not so scary. I was surprised by how willing many actors and directors were when I whipped out the iPhone and asked to shoot some impromptu video of them. For example, having declined even to have his photo taken when I interviewed him last year, Norton was happy to participate in our little video project, offering a cryptic endorsement of the documentary Catfish.
It seems, perhaps, that's a good sign that the times, they are a changin'.
(Photo: Mike Cassese/Reuters)