The fest feels incredibly easy-going this year. More than last. Maybe that’s because there aren’t as many films I’m interested in seeing. After “The Secret of Kells” last week and Atom Egoyan’s “Chloe” later this week, nothing really strikes my fancy.
Yesterday before darting back down the 101 for a Super Bowl party in LA, I caught about an hour or so of the directors panel, “Directors on Directing.” It was an engaging discussion between Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Lee Daniels, Pete Docter, Todd Phillips and Quentin Tarantino, and absolutely packed house. Jason Reitman couldn’t make it.
The most interesting bit that I saw was Tarantino discussing the immersive experience of “Avatar,” how when filming “Kill Bill,” he was very interested in the experience of a movie and making the audience feel participatory in some way. He said he thinks he failed to do that, though some sequences, namely the House of Blue Leaves sequence, were close, but when he saw “Avatar,” he said, “That’s it. That’s the ride I was thinking about.”