![]() I think that cinema is benefitting from that. Discord, Tumblr, and even Reddit, in a broader sense, show us that people are looking to find very specific, very exclusive cliques. While the internet does level everything, it does also create niche groups. I think that audiences are always finding ways to stand out, to have niche tastes. But you know, the rise of Letterboxd shows us that there is a growing cinephile audience that is getting younger and younger. That feels more important now than it did ten years ago because it’s so hard to rise above the noise. Well, this whole festival exists for word-of-mouth of movies we like. It seems like, in a way, you’re almost invoking the imprimatur that festivals put on movies like “Blackberry” that give the public license to then see them. How do you get films like this to people? I’m worried this won’t get made in ten years because it will all be a content farm. Is it arguable that they’re more important now? I worry about movies like this being able to get to an audience in the era of so much streaming noise and so much “content” control. It was a true film education for a young person. That unlocks all of these other festivals. And then, I have a parallel experience at Locarno. And I’m meeting all of these Europeans for the first time. ![]() I won Best Film at Fantastic Fest in Austin, and that winds up opening all of the genre festivals in the Europe, which I never would have been invited to. If “The Dirties” hadn’t done as well as it did, I never would have gone anywhere. Personally, I owe my whole career to festivals. They have an aesthetic among programmers. It’s almost as though the festival winds up contributing to your voice. I have a friend named Kazik Radwanski who’s made a number of films, most recently “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” and right away, he was playing his shorts at Berlin. I think that young people, if they’re thinking of becoming filmmakers, need to look at film festivals and start thinking about what one is in their voice. I teach film at the University of Toronto, and to say that you are gonna have a film career as a director or really any key above-the-line role without a film festival, I think is almost suicide. I don’t think the general public truly understands how the film festival circuit and the film festival culture is more or less responsible for 90% of the independent films that they get to see and the filmmakers and those careers that wind up being commercial. When I was very young, I realized that festivals were everything. Talk a bit about the importance of festivals for this movie, and in general. ![]() This film has already traveled to a lot of festivals in 2023, including Berlinale, SXSW, and here. I sat with Johnson during the opening night screening to pick his brain on why it works and how we got here. ![]() Starring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, and Johnson himself (along with a parade of great character actors like Michael Ironside, Saul Rubinek, and Cary Elwes), “BlackBerry” is an intelligent movie about an untold chapter in tech history. His latest film is his most impressive to date, the story of the tempestuous rise and fall of the BlackBerry personal device, the machine that really set everything in motion that would lead to the worldwide tech addiction we all have regarding the mini-computers we carry everywhere we go. ![]()
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