The 2017 Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing, Lady Gaga performed for the premiere of her Netflix documentary, “Bodied…
The 2017 Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing, Lady Gaga performed for the premiere of her Netflix documentary, “Bodied” director Joseph Kahn kicked the Beyhive and Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” has emerged as the season’s festival darling.
Ever since “Mudbound, ” directed by Dee Rees, first premiered at Sundance in January it has been one of the most talked-about films of the year.
Now the film is looking to take the fall season by storm as well, screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on the way to its release in November.
The film is a vibrant, complex study of race and class set in the 1940s Deep South. Rees and her cast, with Garrett Hedlund, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, Jason Clarke, Carey Mulligan and Jason Mitchell, all stopped by the Los Angeles Times photo studio in Toronto.
“I think the thing that it shows is that all our histories are connected. It’s not like your history and my history, ” said Rees.”This story and the way the story is structured shows these intertwining narratives that make up a singular, collective history.”
“Kings” takes place against the ambitious backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and opens with a dramatization of the 1991 shooting of Latasha Harlins, the 15-year-old African American girl killed by a Korean convenience store owner that set the city on edge.
In a warm, graceful performance, Halle Berry plays Millie, a single woman raising foster children, tending to them all as if they were her own. There are squabbles over noise and nuisances with her neighbor Obie (Daniel Craig) , a British writer who is one of the rare white faces in their South Central neighborhood.
As events seem to inevitability hurtle toward violence, the riots erupt in a surreal haze. Millie and Obie go out into the chaos in hopes of bringing the children safely back home.
The film has taken about 11 years to get made. The Turkish-born, Paris-based writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven spent time in South Central neighborhoods, with the LAPD and with emergency services workers as well as doing extensive research in an attempt to create a broad view of the events, a portrait at once sweeping and specific of the tremors that led up to the seismic hit of the riots. Some of the film’s most fantastical elements — the manager of a fast-food restaurant bargaining with rioters, police handcuffing people to streetlights — are stories she was told as urban folktales.
The movie has its world premiere as part of the Toronto International Film Festival on Wednesday night, with distributor the Orchard planning to release the film in the spring.
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Monster movie maker Guillermo del Toro has been cheering on his favorite creatures since he was a little boy.
“When I was about 6 I watched ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon, ‘” the director said. “I saw Julie Adams and the Gill-man swimming underneath her. At that age all I thought is, ‘I hope they end up together’… they didn’ t.”
Determined to reset the scales in favor of the freaks, Del Toro made “The Shape of Water.” Set during the Cold War, the love story actively roots for the star-crossed lovers separated by species, water and the American government.
The film is already making big waves on the festival circuit, landing the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and plenty of critical acclaim. Times critic Justin Chang described it as an “exquisite return to form” for Del Toro.
The cast (including Michael Shannon, Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones and Sally Hawkins) paused to talk a bit deeper about being a part of the director’s notable, blue-hued imagination at the LA Times studio suite at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I’ ve been in the reality of 1960 three times now, ” Spencer said [alluding to her past work in “Hidden Figures, ” “The Help” and “Get On Up”] . “I love that Guillermo painted a very different world for us to exist in. Even though it’s set in the same era and the societal constraints are the same, my character gets to blossom in a way that I haven’ t in period movies. So it was fun for me.”
As for Del Toro, it appears he’s hit a new high-water mark, which the director credits simply to trying something new, “At age 52 I say, if you don’ t risk it, then you are effectively too old.
Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s newest film, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, ” won best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival before arriving this week to play at the Toronto International Film Festival as well.
In the film, Frances McDormand plays a small-town woman who becomes frustrated when no one is brought to justice after the rape and murder of her daughter. So she sets up three billboards outside of town criticizing the local sheriff.
McDonagh and Sam Rockwell, who plays a police officer, sat down to talk about the film at the Los Angeles Times studio at TIFF.
“I wanted to make an American film with American characters, ” the Anglo-Irish McDonagh said, “that wasn’ t an outsider’s comment on America as much as jumping in there and being with the characters and being with the story.”
In Sebastian Lelio’s “Disobedience, ” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival Sunday, Rachel Weisz plays Ronit, a woman who returns home to the Orthodox Jewish community she fled after her father’s death.
The film also features Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola as Esti and Dovid, Ronit’s childhood friends whom she discovers are married upon her return. During the course of the movie, it is revealed that Ronit and Esti share a passionate, unresolved romantic past.
But “Disobedience” is about more than these characters’ romantic relationships.
“It’s about disobedience, ” explained Weisz at The Times’ TIFF video studio. “It’s about obedience. It’s about how far we rebel from the place that we grew up in. Choosing your own path through that and not just doing what you’ ve been conditioned to do by your family.”
Watch Weisz, McAdams, Nivola and Lelio discuss “Disobedience” and their experiences learning from real Orthodox Jewish families in the video above.
Margot Robbie, Octavia Spencer, Tatiana Maslany, Jessica Chastain, André Leon Talley, Joseph Kahn and more stars of the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival have stopped by the Los Angeles Times studio to pose for photos and discuss their projects in video interviews. Take a tour behind the scenes with Times photographer Jay L. Clendenin.
Check out our gallery of portraits here and instant print photos here .
“Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” tells the story of William Moulton Marston, his wife Elizabeth Marston and the woman they both fell in love with, Olive Byrne. Their relationship would be deeply influential to William Marston creating the character of Wonder Woman.
Written and directed by Angela Robinson, the movie stars Luke Evans as Marston, Rebecca Hall as Elizabeth and Bella Heathcote as Byrne.
“I came at this from the starting point of being a Wonder Woman fan, ” said Robinson. “It was really important for me to tell the story of the Marstons and also honor and respect the character that they actually created.”
Robinson dropped by the L.A. Times photo studio this week with Heathcote and Evans to talk about the project, the unconventional romance at its center and the now-legendary character that came out of it.
“To me it was always a love story, ” said Robinson. “I did a ton of research and I thought about the Marstons so much. And at the end I just tried to make a film about three people falling in love and I wanted you to feel like you feel when you fall in love.”
For more on Robinson, the Marstons and the film, see our recent story .
“When I was growing up, a lot of dudes of that [older] generation had teenage girlfriends, ” Louis C. K., 49, said in an interview with several of his actors Sunday, a day after the premiere of his new film, ‘I Love You, Daddy, ‘ at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“You’ d see pictures of them at Studio 54, and they would have a girl on their lap who was obviously a teenager. And people would say” — he waves aside his hand — “’Oh, that guy just likes that.’ ”
Such taboos are at the center of C. K.’s film. The comedian has made a movie that will at once delight some fans with its audacity and embolden his fair share of critics, what with its talk of sexual politics and parenting in ways that are rarely put on the table.
Shot on the sly earlier this year in C. K.’s home city of New York, the film — which was acquired by specialty distributor The Orchard following the Toronto premiere — is independent in more than just thinking.
The “Louie” creator, famous for overseeing many aspects of the production and even distribution process, funded the entire project himself. As a result, he was able to make noncommercial choices — including presenting the film in black-and-white and using orchestrations from the 1940s. The film feels, early and often, like an homage to vintage Woody Allen.
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Sebastián Lelio’s somber and passionate new drama, “Disobedience, ” begins with the death of a celebrated Orthodox rabbi in North London — a loss that brings his only child, Ronit (Rachel Weisz) , back home from New York to settle her father’s estate.
Received with frosty politeness by the community she fled years ago for a life of secular freedom, Ronit gradually rekindles her friendship with Esti (Rachel McAdams) , whom she is surprised to learn is now the wife of Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) , a spiritual disciple of Ronit’s father.
As will soon come to light, in a series of erotic encounters that are at once tasteful and unusually candid for a prestige drama, Ronit and Esti carry a torch for one another that years apart has failed to extinguish. That more or less explains why Ronit left, but the film, adapted from Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel, is equally curious about why Esti stayed.
Both Rachels are superb here, and if Weisz is ultimately the story’s anchor, the grieving outsider whose perspective we share at every moment, then McAdams is its secret weapon: She’s piercing to watch as she reveals the cracks in her character’s quietly contented facade, in a story that takes the full measure of her tragedy as well.
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Guillermo Del Toro’s beauty-and-the-beast love story “The Shape of Water” had its Toronto premiere Monday at the city’s historic Elgin Theater — the same venue featured in a couple key scenes in the film.
Here are five takeaways from the evening:
“The Shape of Water” opens in theaters Dec. 8.
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When James Franco set out to make “The Disaster Artist” — the behind the scenes story of the making of cult classic “The Room” — he knew he’d have a tough critic in “The Room” director Tommy Wiseau.
When the pair stopped by the L.A. Times studio at the Toronto International Film Festival, Wiseau revealed what he really thinks about the movie and about Franco’s performance as Tommy Wiseau.
