What’s life like for a film festival programmer? Is it a dream job? Or, after months of watching and evaluating hundreds of films—both good and bad—do bleary-eyed festival programmers ever come up for air?

Inside Indies presents a roundtable discussion with three programmers of major U.S. film festivals. Read excerpts from the transcript below, or listen to the audio of the entire discussion.

Participants:
Matt Dentler, festival producer, South by Southwest (SXSW)
Brian Gordon, artistic director, Nashville Film Festival
Rachel Rosen, director of programming, Los Angeles Film Festival

Moderator:
Cathy R. Fischer, senior editor, Inside Indies

Listen to the entire streaming round table discussion. (1:02 hrs) Download the whole discussion as an mp3. (17.9 mb)

Inside Indies [ii]: How many times a month do you go to the movies?

Matt Dentler (SXSW): In the heat of the submission process, when we’re down to the wire, I don’t get to go, ever, but in off-times I go to a theater at least once or twice a week. With DVDs and cable, I'm watching movies all the time. Every time we are done with the festival, I binge on the cheesiest Hollywood stuff because my palate is saturated with really dense, smart, artsy films, so I go to see the worst Hollywood film, just to keep it even.

Rachel Rosen (L.A. Film Festival): I have a similar tradition. When the festival is over I try and find the film with the most explosions, as a palate cleanser. Being in L.A., I go out to a theater or screening once or twice a week…although during the intensive three or four months of programming, not at all.

Brian Gordon (Nashville Film Festival): I normally go once or twice a week outside of the film festivals. Of course when it’s crunch time and I’m making decisions for the festival, it’s strictly DVDs and VHSs. The first thing I do after the festival is read a book, and I like to go out and find old ‘50s and ‘60s B movies.

ii: Do you love any mainstream films that you might be embarrassed to mention to your colleagues?

Rachel: I love many mainstream films and I am rarely embarrassed to mention them to anyone.

ii: Anything you have seen recently you would like to talk about?

Rachel: I just saw The 40-Year-Old Virgin on Friday, and that was funny!

Brian: I guess I enjoyed the last Star Wars; it was great just to sit back and watch. The timing was really good, just a month and a half after our festival finished; it was great to enjoy George Lucas and the special effects.

Matt: I loved Star Wars and War of the Worlds. I thought Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin were both really fun. If there is a genre that’s a guilty pleasure for me, it’s horror films or zombie movies. If I were in grad school, I would probably be writing a thesis about them.

ii: When did you know this was the job you wanted, and what were you doing before this job?

Matt: I had a passion for the whole filmmaking process as far back as I can remember. When I was introduced to this gig, I was in film school at the University of Texas in Austin and was like a lot of people in film school in the 1990s: I thought, "I’ll be the next Quentin Tarantino, the next Richard Linklater," and the more I got into it, the more I realized I sucked as a filmmaker. Then I got involved with the festival scene locally and started interning and volunteering. I did SXSW as an intern and then stuck with it. That was 1997, and I found I had a calling for it.

Rachel: I was a publicist for more mainstream films. I worked for TriStar Pictures, and I knew that wasn’t a good job for me and I ended up going back to graduate school for film. While I was in grad school, I attended a film festival in what was then Czechoslovakia and was energized by the experience. Shortly after that I took a seasonal position at the New York Film Festival and hoodwinked Brian [Gordon] into hiring me the next year at the San Francisco Film Festival. I worked on and off at festivals the whole time I was finishing my graduate degree and, like Matt, realized that I had more of a passion for curating and for helping other filmmakers, rather than the long, hard, lonely work of making your own film.

Brian: I was a broadcast major with the idea of going into filmmaking as well. I got involved in putting on films at the film society at the university I was attending. After graduation, I managed theaters for a while for Landmark—first in Cincinnati (where I’m from), then in Denver. While in Denver I volunteered one year for the Denver International Film Festival. When I moved to the Bay Area, I volunteered for a couple of years at San Francisco [International Film Festival], then I got hired to run the Golden Gate Awards, which was like finally making varsity team.

Brian: There are a few people I know who have straddled both areas who have a film out there. Mystelle Barbee, who did Highway Courtesans, came to us as a filmmaker, and now shešs running Nantucket.

Matt: One of my co-workers at SXSW, Bryan Poyser, has actually done very well. He had his film, Dear Pillow, nominated for a Spirit Award last year. He was doing the festival world and realized when he was making this feature that he really was a filmmaker. Read More