Desert dreaming
A movie bash seeks to raise the profile of global films and gathers Hollywood luminaries as part of its endeavors
BY MARK OLSEN The opening weekend of the Palm Springs International Film Festival was a tidy encapsulation of the event’s dual mission: using the glaring spotlight following some of Hollywood’s brightest names in attendance to also illuminate smaller international films.
The festival opened Friday night with “The Fencer,” a Finnish film set in 1950s Estonia, about a man who starts a fencing club for children, that has recently become an unexpected contender in the year’s foreign language awards races.
The following night offered a larger, more gala-style affair honoring a slate of the industry’s biggest stars including Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Bryan Cranston, Brie Larson, Alicia Vikander, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender, Tom McCarthy and the ensemble cast of “The Big Short.” In the past three years, 28 of the festival’s 31 honorees have scored Academy Award nominations in the same year.
Not only do those disparate worlds co-exist in Palm Springs — they interrelate and overlap. As numerous honorees at the gala joked about the audience seeming more interested in their dinner than the celebrity speeches, Larson and Cranston both noted that f ilms they had made when they were far less notable figures had been screened in Palm Springs, giving them a crucial boost in inspiration and confidence.
“I think it gives us balance,” said Harold Matzner, chairman of the Palm Springs International Film Society, when asked about the seemingly divergent missions of the festival and the gala. “I think it’s important for us as a festival to be important in the film world in Hollywood and also have tremendous strength in foreign film and independent film. When you look at a brand, you have to look at the whole thing.”
That opening-night selection, “The Fencer,” has recently been nominated for a Golden Globe and made the shortlist of nine films leading up to the nominations for the Academy Award for foreign language film.
The Palm Springs fest will feature a panel discussion with all nine directors from that shortlist and will screen 40 of the 80 films submitted for the foreign language Oscar. Many of those films will not receive commercial distribution in the U.S., and so they might play to some of their largest and most receptive audiences at the festival.
The festival’s artistic director, Helen du Toit, introduced “The Fencer” by notVikander, ing that director Klaus Härö had been to the festival on two previous occasions.
When he took the stage, Härö said, “Helen was just doing something we Finns would never do when she spoke so beautifully about me and about the film: She was raising expectations. We would never dream of doing that. We would come up here and say, ‘I hope you all stay till the end.’
“So what I’m going to do now is raise the expectations when it comes to you, and I’m going to say the fondest memories of all the festival audiences that I’ve been able to meet were in Palm Springs. So I’m looking forward to seeing you after the film, that is if you stay till the end.”
That evening of solid drama and tasteful understatement was in sharp contrast to Saturday night, which included a long red carpet, a horde of photographers and media and a black-tie audience of 2,400 people who helped the event raise some $2.4 million for the Palm Springs International Film Society.
Matzner noted in a speech that there were 27,000 individual orchids in the centerpieces around the room before acknowledging the increased security measures surrounding the evening.
“This is not what we should have to do here in America, but is the right thing to do at this time,” Matzner said.
The Palm Springs awards gala is not televised and, as numerous presenters and honorees noted, they can use prepared remarks on a teleprompter if needed. Speeches often feel structured but loose, as if honorees are trying out what they might be saying at awards shows yet to come. Cranston in particular made one of the evening’s sharpest jokes when he said he had not written a speech but nevertheless, “I’m going to look in the teleprompter for inspiration.” After a long pause he added, “There’s nothing there.”
Besides those being honored, the festival included a luminous lineup of presenters, including Amber Heard, Ben Mendelsohn, Kate Winslet, Paul Dano, Helen Mirren, Scott Cooper, Adam McKay, Ridley Scott, Jacob Tremblay and Lenny Abrahamson.
Larson and Mara all gave charming but relatively low-key speeches, each using the moment to celebrate whoever presented their award and to laud their costars and filmmakers.
In accepting an award for his performance in “Steve Jobs,” Fassbender acknowledged the film’s poor box-office performance as he thanked Universal executives: “I believe that you have a movie that will stand the test of time. It’s unfortunate about the box-office figures, but thank God for ‘Jurassic World.’ ”
Saoirse Ronan, in accepting an award for her performance in “Brooklyn,” began by saying, “I know you’re all eating and would probably prefer to do that than listen to me. But tough.”
Noting she wasn’t sure what to say, she added, “I actually Googled Sandra Bullock’s speech from 2014…. I Googled Meryl’s [Streep] as well. Aim high when you’re in doubt.”
The most heartfelt and unexpected moment of the evening came during a tribute video from filmmaker Steven Soderbergh to producer Jerry Weintraub, an advisor to the festival who died in 2015. Featuring video and still photos of Weintraub, Soderbergh spoke in a voice-over about his relationship with the producer of the “Ocean’s” trilogy and the Liberace biopic “Behind the Candelabra.”
“We were the perfect partners,” Soderbergh said in the tribute. “I didn’t want to do his job, and he didn’t want to do mine.”
Arguably the biggest ovation of the night came for Mirren, there to present to her “Trumbo” costar Cranston.
In his speech, Cranston said of jailed writer Dalton Trumbo and the era of the Hollywood blacklist, “It is indeed a dark period not only in Hollywood history but American history, when civil liberties were in jeopardy. And we’re bigger than that.”
When Johnny Depp took to the stage for the first and only time in the evening, all chatter and clanging of dinnerware stopped as the room fell silent, spellbound.
In speaking about his performance in “Black Mass,” Depp alluded to how studio executives are sometimes unnerved by his un-
usual choices in characterization, most famously his “Pirates of the Caribbean” performances. He said, “I’ve experienced a little of that from studios, unhappiness…. Is Michael Eisner here?”
He then made a somewhat rare public statement about his wife, actress Heard, who was in the audience. He thanked her “for putting up with me, for living with all these characters, which can’t be easy. It’s hard for me, it’s got to be hard for her.”
Director Adam McKay introduced members of the cast in “The Big Short” — Finn Wittrock, Jeremy Strong, Steve Carell and Christian Bale — who were accepting the ensemble performance prize. Carell noted that costar Ryan Gosling was not there, quipping, “I think as an ensemble we can all agree we all really hated Ryan Gosling. I think we’re in agreement that we’re happy he’s not here this evening.”
Bale first joked that “I’ve never been at a film festival that ignores the speeches as much as this film festival,” while encouraging those in the audience to take the small green crystal Buddhas at each place setting.
Blanchett received a prize from Ronan. After lauding Ronan’s performance in “Brooklyn,” Blanchett joked, “Remember that tonight is also about me…. Thank you, Saoirse, you can get off the stage now. You’re too young and too gorgeous.”
Blanchett also took note of how nice it is be arrive at an awards gala already knowing you’ve won.
Matt Damon used his speech to largely stump for “The Martian” director Scott, who presented his award.
“Awards, whatever, who gives a … except for this one,” Damon said, before noting that he, like many people, incorrectly assumed Scott already had an Academy Award for “Gladiator,” which won best picture.
“The bottom line is, he’s given more than enough to cinema, so I hope that this is his year,” said Damon.
“I don’t know if we’re supposed to say that out loud,” Damon said and referred to Martin Scorsese’s long-coming Oscar when he added, “but … when I did ‘The Departed’ we said it out loud a lot for Marty, and it panned out.”
On Saturday afternoon, as plastic still covered the red carpet and all the evening’s tables in the cavernous convention center were set but empty, waiting for the throng to come, Matzner reflected on what made the gala a unique event.
“We’ve had promoters come in and talk about televising the show and it would change the show too much. You’d lose control,” Matzner said, adding that organizers have turned down lucrative television offers. “Our honorees and our presenters are relaxed. It’s a different thing. There’s a lot of fun going on and that’s the way we want it. The audiences love it, we love and we want people to be able to relax and say what they want.”
mark.olsen@latimes.com Twitter: @IndieFocus