Hi friends!

Home at last — and a different home at that! It’s been a long time since my last newsletter; in the past couple of months I finished my trip across Europe & Canada, moved house (thankfully just down the road), jumped in & out of intense spells of work, and now have Cooee ramping back up in anticipation of filming again soon. A bit of a whirlwind, but we’re settling in.

There’s so much I’m excited to share, but I’m going to start this week with an experience a lot of friends have been asking me about: the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)! I’ve written a blow-by-blow of what it was like attending the festival in my dual role as a member of the public and as a director’s plus-one on the edges of a massive red carpet gala debut. And in the spirit of Samuel’s superb ghost-story of a second feature, I’m continuing the spooky theme with my thoughts on six more films packed with murder and mayhem for Halloween…

An Invested Australian at the Toronto International Film Festival

There was no way I was going to miss TIFF. It’s not every day that your partner’s Australian / New Zealand indie feature has a gala World Premiere at one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious festivals! Canada wasn’t even part of my original travel plans (they were modest at first, I swear), but once Samuel got word that Went Up the Hill was going to make its debut in Toronto, I added another week (and continent) to the itinerary so I could see his glorious, ghostly film with its first general audience.

It was a bit of a gamble — I booked my flights before anything was official and hoped for the best — but thankfully ended up with six days in Toronto that largely overlapped with the opening weekend of the festival and Samuel’s big events. From here, my experience ran on two parallel tracks.

On the first, I was Samuel’s plus-one for all the industry glitz and glamour: ritzy hotels and shmoozy drinks, red-carpet premieres and afterparties. But in practice Samuel had to spend most of the week doing press and taking meetings, so the majority of my time was given over to exploring the city and the festival as a regular tourist and film nerd. Thankfully, I had some wonderful company on this second track too: production designer Sherree, co-writer Jory & her husband (and producer extraordinaire) Patrick were also in Toronto to support the film, and similarly had just enough free time to stand in line for rush tickets, dig around in the merch stalls and, like most first-time visitors to Ontario, take a day trip to Niagara Falls.

We quickly discovered that TIFF also operates on two different levels. The film side of things is all about serving the vast industry apparatus that jets into Toronto for screenings and schmoozing; whereas the festival is a bigger, communal experience that feels like an integral part of the city itself.

A Ticket Buyer’s Dilemma; or how to watch a movie for under $300

TIFF is the unofficial start of the annual Oscar race: most of the prestige contenders screen here en route to a date at the Dolby Theatre in February. So I had a simple goal for the week: catch as many buzzy films as possible.

Easier said than done. My attempts to pre-book tickets kept hitting roadblocks. The majority of screenings were locked off: industry only (working as a crew member in Australia don’t impress them much). The purchasing windows were rare and confusing: industry and press pre-sales, member pre-sales, no dates for general access. And when I finally did navigate the labyrinth ticketing system, I discovered a dynamic pricing model at work. That single, nosebleed-section ticket to Emilia Pérez? It cost an eye-watering $300.

I soon came to suspect that this process is difficult by design. Unlike Australian film festivals, which live and die by donations and ticket sales to the general public (and tend to be a little, erm, fawning towards their aging subscribers), TIFF doesn’t need us. Its target audience are the critics, buyers and agents who can be easily spotted rushing to and fro with their purple lanyards, moving from screening to screening, downing enormous flasks of coffee at all hours of the day and night on their hunt for the next big thing.

So what is a lanyard-less visitor with plenty of enthusiasm but a perilously low bank balance to do?

Join the Rush Line. Every public screening has one: a cordoned-off area where you line up for a chance to claim any seats left vacant once all the ticket-holders have been seated. It’s a calculated risk. Rush lines for the most popular films stretch across multiple city blocks, with hundreds of people waiting in hopes that there will be enough no-shows to justify the wait — you might line up for minutes, or hours. There could be a dozen seats available; there could be a hundred. The closer to the front of the line, the better your chances.

This sounds like a recipe for disappointment, but it ended up being one of the highlights of my trip. Rush lines are where local film-goers congregate and spend most of their festival: settling in on the sidewalk, debating cinema, comparing their A24 merch pickups, and taking turns to run to the nearby food trucks or bathrooms. Set apart from the film stars and industry bigwigs arriving on the red carpet via black SUVs, there was a real sense of enthusiasm and community. And Sherree and I had terrific luck: we were the final two people admitted to The Last Showgirl (though we missed the first few minutes of the film), and made it into Bird and Pedro Páramo with minutes to spare. You enter the cinema with such a sense of achievement that the film itself can feel like the cherry on top.

A City Transformed; or how to navigate the street and the château

TIFF has two centres: one geographic, and one spiritual.

Most of the action takes place on King Street West near the centre of Toronto, where many of the grand and gorgeous theatres — the Lightbox, Royal Alexandra and Princess of Wales — are situated. Over the first weekend of the festival, the entire street is closed to traffic and transforms into a combination of roving red carpet and street party. It’s packed with food trucks, merch stalls and “fan zones” — although not too densely, because every hour or so the barricades will come out and the Black SUVs will emerge a back laneway, whisking celebrities to the theatre entrance. Super-fans angling for a glimpse at the stars mingle with residents and perplexed tourists, drawn by the thrum of activity. The church is running a book & bake sale to raise money for refugees; corporations are giving out freebies and running kitschy photobooths.

And on every doorstep and corner you’ll find a cluster of volunteers in their blazing, bright yellow t-shirts. I was shocked by just how many volunteers there were; hundreds of them, armed with ear-pieces, clipboards and good cheer, carrying the festival on their collective shoulders.

The other locus point can be found less than a kilometre away, opposite Union Station. This is the Fairmont Royal York, a grandiose châteauesque 5-star hotel that, when it was built almost a century ago, was briefly the largest hotel in the world (and tallest building in Canada). The glamour endures; this is where TIFF puts up its stars and directors — and hence where Samuel and I were staying for the week. On arrival we received a plated chocolate arrangement shaped like a film camera in Samuel’s honour… which I promptly ate on our collective behalf.

The Fairmont was dense with deal-makers and celebrities, and boasted the upscale cocktail prices to match. A small cadre of paparazzi were camped out in the lobby, necks weighed down with multiple long-lens cameras, eyes scrutinising every soul who stepped out of the gilded elevators in case we were worth a snap (nope). I constantly found myself double-taking — is that someone I know or, whoops, okay sorry I’ve seen them in a movie. And then some evenings you find yourself sharing a ride to the ground floor with Roy Kent. I was reminded, early and often, not to share any loud opinions about cinema in public spaces: you never knew which producer, actor or agent could be sipping a margarita right behind you. I believe made it through the week without spilling any coveted local industry secrets.

The Gala Experience; or how to be a supportive bystander on the red carpet

On Thursday night came the big event, the centrepiece of our festival: the World Premiere of Went Up the Hill at the Royal Alexandra Theatre!

After an hour-long round of mixing and matching to alight on the perfect, stylish-but-not-too-formal red carpet lewk, Samuel set off in the early afternoon for a round of press with his lead actors. I didn’t have quite as many options — I had carted my poor blue suit halfway across the world for a wedding in London, so this would be its second (and final) wear of the month-long trip.

I joined some of the team for nerve-settling negronis at the bar before we set off for the Royal Alexandra — arriving half an hour early of course, because 1st AD mode activates automatically even on vacation. A gracious festival co-ordinator brought us through the security cordon to the fringes of the red carpet. Slowly the event took shape: members of the press readied their cameras and mics, squeezed along a narrow strip facing the wall of sponsors; the producers, publicists, reps and sales agents arrived in their slickest suits and most striking gowns; and the fans and star-spotters mustered on the other side of King Street awaiting Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps.

Security waved a Black SUV through one of the temporary barricade, and from the back door emerged Samuel and his stars! Vicky and Dacre embraced the crowd, and posed for photos with delighted fans; Samuel and Jory led the first round of off-the-cuff interviews. There was a flurry of reunions and introductions; some of the team hadn’t seen each other since their shoot ended in New Zealand over a year ago. Patrick and I beamed from afar as our partners navigated the press and public with aplomb — you’d think they’d been making films at this scale for a decade! (Patrick would have his own much-deserved turn in the spotlight just a few days later, as a producer on the Robbie Williams-as-a-Monkey biopic Better Man.)

Naturally everything was running behind schedule, so it wasn’t long until we were whisked inside. After a brief pit-stop backstage, where Samuel rehearsed his introduction and the rest of us grabbed a handful of snacks, we found our spot in the stalls and watched as the Rush Liners were led to the last remaining seats. It was a full house: an eager and invested crowd across multiple levels with little idea of what, exactly, they were in for (there’s not even a poster or a trailer yet!). Samuel made an eloquent introduction full of thanks, and without a single descriptive word about the film, giving his work the space to speak for itself (that’s how you do it!).

The lights dimmed.

This wasn’t my first viewing of Went Up the Hill; but it is a wholly different experience to see it in a world-class theatre with a crowd. To bask in Tyson Perkins’ textured and austere images and the spaces carefully crafted by Sherree Philips; to hear Hanan Townshend’s vocally-driven score haunt the speakers; to be carried along by the changes in energy and pace wrought by Danny Cooper and Samuel over long months in the editing bay. There were the sharp intakes of breath all around us; implacable ripples of tensions, anxiety and emotion. A story, first laboured over by Samuel and Jory Anast at a laptop over four years ago, shepherded by Samantha Jennings, Kristina Ceyton and Vicky Pope, finally come to life. It was sublime.

And when it was over, before the applause had even died out, a surprise — Vicky Krieps came out on stage to sing her beautiful end credits song for us. She’d written it on-set from the perspective of her character (part of her creative process), only for Samuel and the team to realise it was the perfect capper to the film as a whole. A tender, gentle outro. The whole team then joined her for the Q&A. You could feel the genuine love on-stage — awe and appreciation for Vicky and Dacre’s aching and exposed performances, belief in the film, and a palpable sense of relief that it had gone so well.

The mood was already upbeat when we arrived backstage; but it quickly shifted triumphant when we discovered that the first reviews for the film had just dropped (it had been pre-screened for critics a few days prior). Foremost was a rave from the Hollywood Reporter, which ended with the phrase: “shaped in a fresh and artful way by a director who, in his second film, already has the control of a master.” You can imagine what we nicknamed Samuel for the rest of the week. And in short order we were whisked away to an after-party (ft. themed drinks!) and a night on the town, the warm afterglow following us from bar to bar.

We stayed out until the early hours, until that final bar kicked us out, and the streets of inner-west Toronto had fallen silent. Everyone was exhausted — it had been one hell of a day. There would be more to come, tomorrow; more press, more meetings, more questions about what was next. Not to mention a trip to Niagara Falls! But what a treat, to sit in that warm feeling for a little while; in the culmination of years of hard work. I’m so damn proud of him.

Fright Nights: A Halloween Diary

But enough with the sentimentality! In honour of this spoooooky time of year, over the past week I’ve exclusively been watching films jam-packed with murder and mayhem — slashers, monster mashes, whodunnits and hauntings. I think these are six movies worth checking out if you’re looking for inspiration for a Halloween movie night this weekend - or if that fails, do a Renée and stick to the classic “sexy vampires” theme (ft. Interview with the Vampire, Lost Boys, Only Lovers Left Alive & Queen of the Damned).

The Faculty (1998, dir. Robert Rodrigez) Smoosh together a post-Scream slasher-comedy with a sci-fi body snatchers plot ripped straight outta The Thing, set it in a mid-west American high school, and you end up with… the most 90s movie ever. It’s derivative and campy but oh so much fun, with a ridiculous cast of stereotypes and soon-to-be stars: Usher is a school bully, Elijah Wood is a voyeuristic nerd, Clea Duvall is a lesbian who learns to love dudes, Josh Hartnett has perplexingly bad hair, and Salma Hayek & Famke Janssen are “dowdy” teachers who need to be possessed by aliens to learn they have sex appeal. This is the kind of movie that purports to valorise ‘misfits’ and ‘freaks’, but inevitably gives everyone a hot heteronormative hook-up by film’s end. Still, where else are you going to watch a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart get stabbed in the eye with a pen laced with caffeine pills?
Available to stream on Stan.

The Last of Sheila (1973, dir. Herbert Ross) A cold-blooded mystery featuring a cast of rich jerks sailing around Mediterranean whose parlour games quickly descend into murder. Scripted by Anthony Perkins (!) and Stephen Sondheim (!!), it’s deliciously twisty and nasty, growing more interesting and outlandish as it goes. If you want a temperature check on how society has changed in the past 50 years, marvel at how this movie deems ‘homosexual’, ‘shoplifter’ and ‘child molester’ equally shameful secrets that rich celebrities might be (only slightly) inconvenienced by. After indulging in some brazen audience gaslighting — I had to resist the urge to rewind to check I hadn’t completely imagined a clue — it comes to a devilish finish that somehow involves puppets.
Available to rent on AppleTV or stream on Criterion.

The Fog (1980, dir. John Carpenter) A fog concealing a ship’s worth of vengeful ghosts descends on a small coastal town in Carpenter’s underseen follow-up to the original Halloween. Honestly, I could have used a little more murder and mayhem. Carpenter takes his time setting up the town, populated by a disparate cast of characters, and dialling up the tension, but it’s all over too soon. The film teases a genuinely interesting question about generational culpability — the ghosts were victims of the town’s founders, who stole their money to build this coastal retreat and are venerated for it — but fails to develop it. Even if it doesn’t live up to the promise of its premise and cast (mother and daughter stars Jamie Lee Curtis & Janet Leigh in their first film together!), it’s beautifully shot and loaded with great set-pieces.
Available to rent on Google or stream on Criterion.

Throne of Blood (1957, dir. Akira Kurosawa) Unfortunately for John Carpenter, Kurosawa’s samurai adaptation of Macbeth gets my vote for finest on-screen fog of the week. No director wields the elements like Kurosawa. I know this isn’t technically a horror film, but it’s the closest the master ever came, laden with ghosts, blood and creeping shadows. But despite a marvellously creepy witch, the most unsettling presence here is Asaji (i.e. Lady Macbeth, played by the superb Isuzu Yamada), who glides across the floorboards like a serpent, and incites murder through a calm, implacable facade. Perhaps my favourite cinematic Shakespeare adaptation — Kurosawa jettisons the language but hews closely to the plot and tone, and miraculously makes one of the bard’s toughest stage directions work on-screen: for a brief moment, you actually believe that a forest is marching on Spider Web Castle.
4K Restoration now screening.

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) I revisit Bride at least once a year — it’s easily my favourite of the original Universal Monsters cycle, and packs more into 74 minutes than most modern seasons of TV. Whale’s command of tone is extraordinary: he deftly dances from horror (acquiring the “young” heart) to earnest humanism (the Monster befriends the blind man) to queer camp (everything with Doctor Praetorius) and back again, sometimes within a single scene. I’ve even grown to love the broad comic relief characters. And then there’s the visuals. Whale situates the film in a sumptuous gothic never-never-land, unmoored in time (are we in the 18th or 20th century?) and space (is this Eastern Europe, or the quaint English countryside?). The triumph of design culminates in the Bride herself, who I only learnt on this re-watch was modelled after the ancient Egyptian Bust of Nefertiti — which helps explain her extraordinary, rigid lightning-bolt hair. The Bride is only on screen for a matter of minutes, but Elsa Lanchester makes every twitch and hiss count.
Available to rent on Google / AppleTV or stream on Criterion.

Late Night with the Devil (2023, dir. Cameron & Colin Cairnes) An impressive and chilling work of local low-budget horror, set during the taping of a late night show’s Halloween special in 1977. It’s a well-paced slow burn, laced with dread and hints of the supernatural that will eventually — surely? — erupt in front of this unlucky live studio audience. I only wish the film stuck more closely to its “found footage” conceit — the best material is the “on-air” segments that make up the bulk of the film, and genuinely sell that we’re watching the tape of a lost (and possibly cursed) broadcast. Everything else — the “vérité” BTS footage, the format breaks — undermine the sickly sensation of watching a live TV experiment going terribly wrong, and yet not being willing, or able, to change the channel.
Available to stream on Netflix.

Odds & Ends

• Korean author Han Kang — author of The Vegetarian, which I really need to read — won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature! The announcement was quickly followed by her novels selling out across South Korea, and her principled refusal to hold a celebratory event with the war in Gaza still ongoing: “with the war intensifying and people being carried out dead every day, how can we have a celebration or a press conference?” Bravo!

• A helpful deep-dive from ABC News about the insidious rise of Live Nation in Australia’s live music scene, and the damage they (and a bunch of other multi-national conglomerates) are doing to not just ticket prices, but the industry as a whole.

• And finally… Halloween is Aubrey Plaza’s holiday, and we’re just here to pay tribute. It’s been a great month for Plaza all around — she outright steals Megalopolis with her arch femme fatale turn, she’s the best part of the heartwarming, high-concept coming-of-age drama My Old Ass, and she’s a cackling delight as a gay witch in the Kathryn Hanh-led Agatha All Along (the only Marvel-adjacent movie or show I’ve gone anywhere near this year, no regrets). If you’re as enamoured with Plaza as I am, check out her wonderful interview with the NYTimes, or her unhinged Hot Ones appearance with fellow icon Patti LuPone.

A reminder for any friends who can vote in the AACTAs — the wonderful web series Pleasant Avenue that I AD’ed last year is in the running for the Online Comedy awards! Give it a watch and a vote and if can.

That’s all from me this week, thanks for reading! Next time I’ll be back with thoughts on religious art, the future of museums and the Kit Kat Club…