Sometime before 5 am tomorrow morning I'll begin my journey to the Telluride Film Festival with Spout. You'll be able to follow all of our coverage of the festival here.
This will be my third festival with Spout, but my first time at Telluride. Here's what I know so far: Telluride is a really good festival, with lots of A-list movies and people. Last year at the festival the Spout guys interviewed Forrest Whittaker and Kevin MacDonald just before the premiere of their film The Last King of Scotland, which went on to win Whittaker the Oscar for Best Actor. They also caught up with Laura Linney and Peter Bogdanovich, among others. When they weren't hob-nobbing with Oscar winners, they were checking out little known films like Julia Loktev's Day Night Day Night, which is easily the most sober and challenging investigation of terrorism I've ever seen on film.
So needless to say, I'm a little nervous. I've been doing this podcast stuff for a little while now, and I do feel like I'm getting better at it. But the prospect of talking to celebrities while not making a fool of myself is still daunting. What doesn't help is that Telluride doesn't release the line-up of films until one day before the festival begins!
One rumor I've heard is the possibility of a Daniel Day Lewis retrospective. Last November I interviewed Tim Robbins on the red carpet outside of a retrospective for him at the Denver Film Festival. That wasn't too bad, but let's compare:
Interviewing Andy Dufrain...
Easy!
Interviewing Bill the Butcher...
Holy Sh*t! Run! It's Bill the Butcher!
As if that weren't scary enough, check out this trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's forthcoming There Will Be Blood, starring the most terrifying man on the planet:
THIS JUST IN! While writing this post I've received word that the festival program has been announced! Daniel Day Lewis is in! I just wet my pants!
But I need to keep this all in perspective. They're just people, right? And they wouldn't go to film festivals if they didn't want to talk about their work. I just need to remember that groveling is not fun for anyone, but talking about movies, on the other hand, now that's a good time.
Interviewing Daniel Day Lewis is going to be awesome. "There Will Be Blood" just adds to the mythos of DDL.