How TIFF Became Global: Cameron Bailey on 50 Films That Shaped the Festival

By the time we invited the film, Oprah came on as an executive producer. She had just seen it when it played at Sundance and she loved it. Tyler Perry also came on as an executive producer and they all came to Toronto. Oprah had never been to Toronto. Tyler had never been to Toronto for the festival. We had Mary J. Blige, who did the song for the film. We had Mariah. All of these people were coming onto stage at Roy Thompson Hall.

Thank you for having me. I'm good.

I am. Fight me.

Come on. Are you ready?

When you make a list, you ask anybody, top five movies, their favorite pop songs, top five rappers of all time, you're asking for a fight, right? And that's part of the fun of making a list is that it's going to be personal. It's going to be something that reflects who you are in that minute, but everybody's going to have different opinions, and that's what makes a great conversation.

It was literally film by film, page by page. We every year publish a catalog, a program book for that year's festival. I went back to the first one from 1976, which was pretty thin and smaller, and worked my way through 49 of those, looking at every film that we programmed. I started by doing this over my Christmas break, so that's how I spend my holidays. I found about maybe 300 films initially that I thought were defining for TIFF, for what was then the Festival of Festivals and then the Toronto International Film Festival over five decades. I was looking for films that really helped advance us as a festival in terms of our international reputation and also where we were able to advance the career of that film. So, there's some obvious ones from the beginning. Films like The Big Chill, which made its world premiere with us, and Princess Bride, Shawshank Redemption, Slumdog Millionaire. I think everybody knows these are films that went on to become iconic and they launched in Toronto with a Toronto audience, but there's lots of other places you can go. There was a time when we were at the vanguard of bringing international cinema from Asia, for instance, to North America. There was a time when you couldn't find Hong Kong action movies and you couldn't find Japanese anime so easily. And we brought a lot of those movies to Toronto for the first time, to North America for the first time. So I came up with what I thought was a pretty good list, but even that number I had to bring down to about a hundred. We sent that out to a lot of my colleagues, past and present programmers and leaders of the film festival. I said, we have a hundred here. Have a look at this. Give us your thoughts. We want to bring this down to 50. And they came back to me with about another 600 films. So then I had another piece of work to do.

I know. Well, by that point we're into January, February. But I had to bring that down to 50 in total and I did want it to reflect the full range of what we do. As you mentioned, documentary films, films from all over the world, and a real range of emerging filmmakers and legendary filmmakers. Steven Spielberg has The Fabelmans on the list, but we also have filmmakers who were unknown at the time. That range was important and it was a tough job because we had to say no. I had to say no to a lot of films that I knew were important and people would want to see on the list, but it had to be 50.

That's part of the gig.

That was easy. I have to say I did most of this work before the inauguration south of the border, so that really was not a factor. But Canadian films have been a part of TIFF's history since the very beginning. We had people leading the festival and programming back then, Piers Handling and Peter Harcourt and many others who were experts in Canadian cinema. They studied it as scholars, and so in very early days we were bringing in films by Denys Arcand, for instance. And then this generation that came out of Toronto in the 80s and 90s, Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema, Don McKellar, Clément Virgo, lots of other filmmakers like that. So often they would show their very first films at their hometown festival, which was always great to do. And then of course, some incredible films from Quebec, Denis Villeneuve's first film showed at our festival. So we already had a great body of work from Canadian cinema and it just made sense to really reflect that in the list.

Her film Away from Her is on the list. It's one of my favorites. Her first feature, just a beautiful love story. She was quite young when she made it and she made it about an older couple, but Sarah is wise beyond her years. She always has been and I think it's a film that really stands up.

That's interesting. I think one of the most recent, if not the most recent film on the list is a film by Hayao Miyazaki called The Boy and the Heron. And that is one of those examples of the real artistry of Japanese animation. He's a legend. When we first started showing his films, he was a bit of a niche filmmaker. But now there's Miyazaki stuff all over the place. If you just type his name into the internet, you will find all kinds. You can go on forever. So we were very lucky to have the international premiere of that film, meaning the film had played nowhere outside of Japan before we showed it in Roy Thompson Hall on opening night a couple of years ago. And that made the list because first of all, I think he's just a master filmmaker, one of the great artists in cinema. He has a completely original vision which he expressed through largely hand-drawn and hand-painted animation, if you can believe that. And it's a great work of art and I wanted that to be on the list. I think the reason it's a part of TIFF's future is because animation has become, I wouldn't say animation has grown up, but the audiences for animation have really grown up. On the night that we had the international premiere of The Boy and the Heron, Guillermo del Toro, the great Mexican filmmaker, was our guest and he got on stage at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto and said, animation is cinema. Animation is art. It's not just for kids. In fact, this movie is not at all for kids. It's in the art form similar to great works of imagination. And it's probably too much for little kids to even take on. So animation has grown up. We're going to see a lot more of that in the future. Audiences all over the world are much more sophisticated than they used to be around animation. So that's a good example of where we're going to go. But there's lots of filmmakers who we are still discovering. There's a guy named William Oldroyd who made a film called Lady Macbeth which was Florence Pugh's first leading role. She's fantastic, ferocious in that movie if you haven't seen it. And that filmmaker represents the future of cinema as well.

I will give you a couple of examples. Lately, now that I'm in this role as CEO at TIFF, I'm programming mostly just the gala films, the films that play in Roy Thompson Hall. Many years ago, I was at the Sundance Film Festival and I saw a film called Precious by Lee Daniels. Really powerful film, debut of Gabourey Sidibe, but incredible cast, Mariah Carey's in it and Lenny Kravitz and others as well. I was in the audience at its world premiere. Loved the film. I was there for the Q&A when Lee Daniels got up to answer questions from the audience. During the Q&A, he got a phone call and he answered it. On the phone was Oprah Winfrey. He was sharing this with the audience. By the time we invited the film, Oprah came on as an executive producer. She had just seen the film when it played at Sundance and she loved it. Tyler Perry also came on as an executive producer and they all came to Toronto. Oprah had never been to Toronto. Tyler had never been to Toronto for the festival. We had Mary J. Blige who did the song for the film. We had Mariah. All of these people came onto stage at Roy Thompson Hall to see Precious. If you have seen Precious, that is a tough movie. It's about painful stuff and it doesn't hold back. This is our fanciest audience, so they had to be a little bit prepared for it. But honestly, I think the Oprah effect did the trick because everyone was so excited. I invited my mom because it was a big deal. So that's a case where the film itself is challenging but you think if you present it in the right frame and the right circumstances, you can bring an audience towards it. Another time, more recently, Claire Denis, a great French filmmaker who I'm a big fan of, made a sci-fi feature starring the great French actress Juliette Binoche but also Robert Pattinson. I don't think she ever worked with American stars on that kind of level before. He has his own following which will follow him for the rest of his life. Absolutely. But the movie is wild and quite aggressive in some ways. It has a certain scene about the middle of the film which is a kind of sex scene involving Juliette Binoche and a device. That's all I'm going to say. I truly can't describe it, but you should see it. I knew that our fanciest audience might be a little taken aback by that scene and some of the content of the film, but you had Robert Pattinson, the excitement of having these two big stars, and it was a world premiere as well. I think given that opportunity, that's where you get to challenge your audiences more. When you give them a little bit of something that they know and love, a beloved star, then you can take them a little further.

That's a tough one. An opening night film has to do a lot of different things. First of all, you want it to be a great movie, a great experience for the audience, something that really takes them on a ride, a journey. You want there to be some excitement in the room about who's there. So whether that's stars, we've had all kinds on opening night. We've also had films that really reflect Canadian history. We opened with Passchendaele a few years ago which was very much about World War I heroes from Canada. We had Mounties that night on the red carpet. So you want some in-person excitement. You want a movie that tells a great story and you want people to leave thinking, I can't wait to see more movies at the festival. All of those things. It's a wide range of people. Sometimes in opening night theaters at the festival, we may have people who go out to see one or two movies all year. So it's kind of a big deal. They get dressed up and they want it to deliver for them. I want their appetite to be whetted to see even more movies. That's part of what we're trying to do.

Festival Street is something that we started when we moved from Yorkville, which was really the hub of the festival for many years, to downtown on King Street closer to TIFF Lightbox. We wanted to energize that neighborhood by closing down the street. We are grateful to the city of Toronto and the TTC for letting us do that for four days for the last many years, to bring people onto the street. We've got lots of our partners who have activations going on. There's a real vibe. Even if you don't have a ticket to a film or you just want to go and see what's going on, that's what people do.

Exactly. Hundreds of thousands of people do that every year. But then also, you never know what you're going to see. Many years ago, one of the first years of Festival Street, we had this great programmer for the street activities, whose name is Nour Edelman, who's part of Choir! Choir! Choir! which does these amazing music events all over the world now, but he wasn't doing that at that degree then. He found this young musician in Regent Park whose name is Mustafa the Poet, who was a teenager at that time, and he came and performed on Festival Street, which was beautiful. Now he's a big star. He does fashion shoots all over the world. He's got great releases and he's a massive important Canadian musician. Back then he was just a teenager from Regent Park. We wanted to bring that kind of vibe onto the street as well and we try to do that every year.

When you walk down King Street where the stars on Canada's Walk of Fame are actually installed and you see everybody who's there, Canada's greatest athletes and entertainers and artists, it's a remarkable company to be in. That means a lot. We have been trying to contribute to the culture of the country for 50 years and I think it's a recognition of the fact that it's become a kind of event and a brand that's known widely within the film world and brings a lot of respect and recognition back home to us as well. If that is what gets us into that company, then we are really grateful.

It's hard to say exactly, but I know that for me and for a lot of the people who've worked at TIFF over the years, thinking globally always made sense. Three founders of the festival were three guys who were really curious about the world. They went to the Cannes Film Festival every year and would hang out in their Speedos on the beach. I don't think I've ever done that and I don't think I ever will. You can look it up all you want and not see a picture of me in a Speedo. They enjoyed the good life at Cannes and wanted to bring some of it back but make it Toronto. What they did from the very beginning, going back to 1976 in the first year, Toronto was being transformed by waves of immigration from different parts of the world and just Europe. They wanted that to be part of the spirit of the festival. They wanted to bring the world to Toronto. We were one of the first international film festivals to show new Iranian cinema, new Latin American cinema, new Soviet cinema. That has always been a part of who we are. The way that we get a global reputation is by actually bringing global cinema to Toronto every single year.

No socks.

You're not going further back than that? 1940s.

Actually, 90s. 1999 is still one of the very best years ever in cinema. Just look up the movies that were made in 1999 and you'll see. So I'm going with the 90s.

That's easy. Middle.

Miranda Priestly ran the festival back in the day, actually, some might say. Ferris Bueller or Ted Lasso? Interesting. I think it's got to be Ted Lasso because of those three, Ted Lasso has the most heart. In the end, that's kind of what you need. You need a little Miranda, but more Ted Lasso.

Die Hard.

I love Elf. One of my favorites. Spaghetti with maple syrup.

It's actually not tasty at all.