Studios are making it difficult for major talent to attend film festivals by not releasing them from film shoots, according to Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera.
“We don’t have any kind of power,” said Barbera, speaking alongside former Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and Red Sea International Film Festival director Edouard Waintrop, in a conversation session called ‘The future of film festivals’.
“We have to beg them [the talent] to come; we have to beg them to stay as long as they can in the festival; we have to beg them to do interviews,” Barbera continued. “Sometimes they come and say, ‘We’re not doing any interviews’. And you say, ‘Why? You are here to promote the film, why don’t you do interviews?’ [They say] ‘Because we don’t want to talk about this or that, we don’t want to be asked about politics.’ So this is an obstruction.”
Despite the difficulties, the Venice team has succeeded in bringing major talent to the festival on a regular basis. Attendees so far this year include Timothee Chalamet, Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Sigourney Weaver, while Harry Styles, Florence Pugh and Ana de Armas are among those set to attend next week.
Barbera described making the screening schedule as “the worst part of my job”, due to the logistical difficulties of securing talent attendance. “It’s really difficult to find just a couple of days to convince them to come from shooting to promote the film – they have to run to another shoot.”
The Venice director also criticised the attitudes of major production companies and their publicists towards the press. “They have an obsession about control, the way of relating with the journalists, with the critics and so on,” he said. “They are absolutely scared that they could lose control on anything – interviews, photos, TV reports and so on.
“They won’t let talent or filmmakers be open, to take any interview without having it under control. It’s a nightmare; this is not the proper way to do promotional activity. But that’s the way it is. There is no way for us to change this kind of situation.”
Generation game
Waintrop, who oversaw Directors’ Fortnight from 2011 to 2018 as part of 27 years working at the Cannes sidebar, identified a separate challenge for festivals.
“The growing age of the audience is not good news,” he said. “[At Directors’ Fortnight] the average age of people was growing one year every year – it was the same people who were coming.
“It’s very important to appeal to the young audience – the audience which was captured by the platforms.”
Waintrop spoke in positive terms about his experience with Red Sea, which he departed after helming the festival’s first edition. The audience, he said, was “very young” and predominantly female. “That was very exciting to work for them [Red Sea], to know that the people who wanted to go to the cinemas was the young part of the audience,” said the director. “They were very proactive.”
Age “is one of the most interesting points” added Barbera, who conceded that young people “are not going to see any other kind of films” except franchise blockbusters. “But this means it’s not that young people are not interested in cinema,” he continued. “They are, when you offer them something that attracts their audience.”
The number of under-18s attending Venice has increased tenfold over the last decade, Barbera said, from “one to two hundred” 10 years ago to “almost 2,000” now.
Streamer situation
Venice’s close relationship with Netflix has been noted over the years; the 2022 edition is no different, with five films from the company playing at the festival including Noah Baumbach’s festival opener White Noise.
While Barbera acknowledged that “most of the films produced by the streamers will be released only online,” he maintained that companies including Netflix, Amazon and Apple need the festivals for “the most important things that they are producing”, citing films by Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion, Paolo Sorrentino and David Fincher.
“The best way to promote these kind of films is to use the launching platform of the festivals,” said the director. “They have the most effective way to give them value, because they can get a huge promotion from all the press and individuals attending the festival, which does a lot to attract the attention from the general audience.”
Both men agreed they are optimistic about the current state of affairs for film gatherings. “The future of festivals will be the quality of the event,” said Waintrop. “The quality of the meetings between the artists and the audience, between the professionals. When you are happy meeting people, you have a better event.”
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