June
18
LAFF: Yeldham Leads Charge
It's crucial that new Los Angeles Film Festival director Rebecca Yeldham programmed an indie opener for Thursday night's LAFF launch. She waited and waited and hung in for the right movie, long after her staff was comfortable, through Cannes. But she finally found her opener. "I wanted for the opening to find a film that reflected the spectrum of great movies in our contemporary film culture," says Yeldham. "We didn't have an American independent as one of the tentpoles."
Yeldham had read Paper Man at the script stage. She knew the filmmakers. "I was excited about what it could be," she said. "We had to see it manifested." In the nick of time, she and programmer Rachel Rosen were able to see Michele and Kieran Mulroney's finished movie, which stars Jeff Daniels as a man with an imaginary superhero friend (Ryan Reynolds). It passed muster. So LAFF is debuting a brand new indie film no one has seen. "I loved the idea of playing something of this quality for the home crowd," says Yeldham. "We're presenting two new directors to not only the industry and the public but to specialty distributors."
For Yeldham, who during a deep recession managed to hang on to most sponsors, add a few new ones and streamline without losing any significant programs, LAFF is "a distinctive festival. It's not just an indie film fest. We're embracing all films from all sources."
Thus Yeldham booked a few studio tentpoles into the Westwood-centered summer fest, from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (after all, the fest had premiered Michael Bay's first iteration) to the fest's centerpiece, Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and fest closer, Disney's English-language version of animation great Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo.
The fest also waited until the last minute to announce artists in residence Khaled Hosseini (Yeldham produced, with William Horberg, the movie version of Hosseini's book, The Kite Runner) and Thom Mayne, the Pritzker-prize winning architect. Hosseini presents on Saturday night The Stoning of Soraya M. After the screening he'll talk with the film's writer Cyrus Nowrasteh, star Shohreh Aghdashloo and religious scholar Reza Aslan about women and Islam. "This sort of rich contextualization of the movie might never happen again," says Yeldham.
Mayne will talk about architecture and cinema to cinematographer Fred Elmes, who shoots for Jim Jarmusch, Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch.
Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez will present a festival conversation with his three kids; they'll talk about making the family film Shorts, with a behind-the-scenes show-and-tell. "They conceived the movie and worked together," says Rosen. "It's for kids."
Some movies are being presented free, including Sundance faves Amreeka and The Cove. The LAFF is also assembling its filmmakers for an off-the-record retreat.
Yeldham and Rosen decided not to worry about where some of their fave selections had already played---a healthy number of films debuted at Sundance, especially--so 500 Days of Summer, Big Fan, Cold Souls, In the Loop, Paper Heart, it Might Get Loud, Humpday, We Live in Public, Black Dynamite, Soul Power, and When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors are all in the program. "Plenty of American independents didn't meet the standards for our programmers," says Yeldham. "Beautiful movies need support. We don't censor anything. I'd rather present films we can stand behind. We're aggressively launching new talent and movies too."
IndieWire posts interviews with LAFF directors.
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