Richard Crouse

I’ve been covering the Toronto International Film Festival for 30 of the 50 years of its existence. I’ve dusted off some memories from those years as a personal look back at the fest’s first half century.

2024: The absolute highlight of my 2024 TIFF this year was hosting the Hazelton Hotel’s unveiling of the state-of-the-art screening room as the Norman Jewison Cinema. It was a star-studded affair, but it wasn’t about the glitz and glam, it was a touching tribute to an iconic filmmaker who was in attendance to feel the love for him and his work.

2023: Watching the debut of Atom Egoyan’s ambitious meditation on the healing power of art, “Seven Veils” at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, the same theatre where most of the movie’s action takes place. It was was very cool to allow your eyes to wander away from the screen for a moment, without feeling like you were being taken out of the story.

2019: I made Bruce Springsteen. We talked at a lunch for his movie “Western Stars” and I told him about my first time using a Sony Walkman. I borrowed a Walkman, used the last of my cash to buy a “Born In The USA” cassette and walked through the Eaton Centre with the thing turned up to 11. As let the music reverberated around my head I remember thinking, “This is so much easier than lugging the stereo around.” He liked the story and said, laughing, “Thanks for telling me that.”

2001: In September of 2011 I hosted a press conference with Brad Pitt and the cast of the sports drama “Moneyball.” As we walked out on the stage dozens of flashbulbs flared repeatedly, as photographers yelled Pitt’s name. “Brad! Look over here!” I quickly stepped aside. A great picture of Pitt could pay the photographer’s mortgage for the month. A snap of Pitt with a bewildered looking me in the frame couldn’t fetch enough to buy a pack of gum. Still, even on the sidelines I was unprepared for the ferocity of the experience. Thousands of pops of light. The shouting. The intensity of the moment left me knock-kneed, disoriented and seeing spots. Pitt, however, was grace under pressure, flashing his megawatt smile and posing while helping the gaggle of photographers pay their bills that month. Backstage I said to Pitt, “That was pretty intense.” He looked baffled, as if I had just recited “The Lord’s Prayer” to him in Esperanto. “The photographers. The flashes…” I offered by way of explanation. “Oh yeah,” he said unconvincingly, “that was wild…” But for him, it wasn’t wild. It’s perfectly normal for him to be at the center of attention storms like this.

In the early years of covering the festival all the television outlets would set up studios in rooms at the Intercontinental Hotel on Bloor Street. For ten days actors, directors and other talent would go room to room shooting interviews. On TV the set ups looked good, but in reality, they were cramped spaces that smelled of anxiety and expensive perfume. One year instead of paying to have all the furniture moved out, we pushed it to the side, just out of shot, with the mattress propped up against the wall. When Frances Ford Coppola came in to talk about his restored version of “One from the Heart” he looked around and congratulated us for using the mattress as a sound barrier between us and the bustling hallway. “It’s so noisy in the other rooms,” he said.

2021 THE PANDEMIC FESTIVAL: The sound of an audience laughing, applauding, crying, or whatever. Just being an audience. The big venues were socially distanced, and often looked empty to the eye, but when the lights went down and folks reacted to the opening speeches or the films, it didn’t matter. Roy Thomson Hall, with its 2600-person capacity, may have only had 1000 or so people in the seats, but for ninety minutes or two hours they formed a community, kindred souls brought together after a long break, and it was uplifting to hear their reactions.

TWEET: There’s a guy in my neighborhood who thinks my name is TIFF as in, “Hey TIFF! Why aren’t you at the film festival?” #everydamnday #TIFF17

2024: The most idiosyncratic movie I saw that year, “Megalopolis,” the forty-years-in-the-making passion project from Francis Ford Coppola, is equal parts hammy and hopeful, dense and dazzling. It’s the work of a filmmaker with nothing left to prove, and brims with imagination, ambition and, unfortunately, self-indulgence. Most memorable part? A fourth-wall-breaking moment where a live person in the audience interacted with Adam Driver’s character on screen.

2016: Queen of Katwe star David Oyelowo on working with nonactors on the film: “I actually took a bunch of the kids to see Jurassic World while we were doing the film and Madina (Nalwanga), who plays Phiona, sat next to me and was clutching me the whole time, terrified by the movie. She turned to me and said, ‘Is this what we are doing?’ I asked her if she had ever seen a film before and she said no. We were halfway through shooting a film in which she is playing the lead.”

2023: I haven’t spent much time on the TIFF red carpets, but I was beyond tickled to see the iconic “tickle trunk” from kid show M<r. Dressup” on the carpet for “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe.”