Sundance's Eugene Hernandez: The Rushfield Conversation
A week before Park City, the fest's programming chief on the films to watch, its big move and the political climate.
FEST MAN Sundance Festival director Eugene Hernandez (Hernandez: Mat Hayward/Getty Images for We Are UK Film; Park City: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
The 41st Sundance Film Festival begins next week in Park City, Utah in a more uncertain moment than it has seen perhaps since its founding. First, it takes place as the embers still smolder from the fires here at home in L.A. Then it confronts the continuing uncertainty about independent film’s place in the industry landscape. Finally, there’s the question mark about the festival itself. As a decision looms about Sundance’s new home, this will be the penultimate gathering taking place purely in Park City.
Amidst all that, I spoke yesterday with Eugene Hernandez, now in his second year as festival director, and a native of Indio, Calif., as he sifted through the world from the Institute’s Santa Monica offices, preparing to head off for the mountains later that day.
Richard Rushfield: We’re a week out from the start of the festival, and you’re doing it in the shadow of the fires here in L.A. Your offices in Santa Monica are literally down the block. How has it all gone?
Eugene Hernandez: So many of us have been disrupted or displaced the last week or so. Thankfully, my apartment is intact and I was able to get back to it on Saturday. But we have staff and also a number of artists and filmmakers who’ve been impacted. Taken as a whole, I think getting out of town will be a nice thing, because we’re all going to a place where we can all be together in a smaller community and environment. The vibe will probably be a little bit different. I’ve been reflecting on that myself, thinking about how meaningful that will be.
In a weird way, it’s a chance to get the kind of L.A. community that you don’t get in L.A. Every year, there are people that I only see at the festival who live three blocks away from me. From my earliest days — my first festival was ’93 — it was always this opportunity either to connect with people who you might live in the same city with but you don’t have that opportunity to watch a bunch of movies with and have a drink after or dinner or whatever. It’s always been this place of renewal and reconnection. I think this year we’re going to feel that in a different way. It should be pretty nourishing for all of us.
RR: What’s keeping you awake in these final hours?
EH: Well, the impact of what’s been happening in Los Angeles. The safety and security of our teams, our colleagues, our filmmakers. But in addition, it is each of the premieres. So there’s, like, 16 premieres per day over the course of the first six days of the festival, right? So there’s this modular quality to every day.
Each of those premieres is — I’ve shorthand called it like a wedding day, because there are so many elements related to each and every one of those premieres. We need to do our best to set up each of these films for the best possible long life they can have. We’re just the beginning of the journey for so many of these films. You can see how successful some have been in the awards conversation. Each film has different needs and comes into the festival with different goals. Some need distribution. Some have distribution and are looking to help launch. Some are looking for that critical acclaim. Some are looking to be seen by other curators so they can be seen by other festivals.
When I used to go to the festival as a journalist (Hernandez was a cofounder of Indiewire before crossing over into festival management), I used to think a lot about how transformative that moment can be for a Sundance film. We’ve seen it year in, year out: Filmmakers who literally arrive at the festival on Thursday one person, and leave a totally different one.
RR: Are there many filmmakers coming who’ve been very impacted by the fires? How are they feeling about coming in the midst of all that?
EH: I’ve spoken to a lot of them in the last few days . . . filmmakers who have lost something or been dramatically displaced or dislocated, had their lives disrupted. A number of them have expressed to me personally that as disrupted as their lives may be, how much they still continue to look forward to Sundance as a place where they can unveil something that they’ve been working on for a long time because of that transformational potential that exists.
I think there will be emotion, but I think it will be tempered by the opportunity to be there together, to share in that experience and share those stories. You know, it’s in a film like Max Walker Silverman’s Rebuilding, which is a film about rebuilding in the wake of a wildfire. Josh O’Connor plays a dad who’s navigating his life after the destruction of a wildfire. So that film will take on new resonance.
RR: Sundance has changed so much over the years. What remains consistent?
EH: Sundance is a festival of international discovery. That mission has remained constant but what has evolved is, when I started going in the '90s, it was maybe looked at through more the American lens. Now it’s a festival of of international discovery. So we’ve got folks traveling from all over the world, including Africa, the farthest reaches of the world, bringing their films to this festival.
It’s this amazing connection that happens when our artists start arriving, some coming to the festival for the very first time and convening with a number of alums. Bill Condon has been to Sundance before, and Sundance was transformational for him in 1996 when he was here with Gods and Monsters. For someone like him, bringing an independent musical starring J.Lo (Kiss of the Spider Woman), is super exciting. But for him to be a mentor to some of these younger folks, who are literally at the very beginnings of their career from around the world, is also really cool.
RR: With the announcement looming of the festival’s new home, will you be doing anything special during this year to acknowledge this chapter coming to an end?
EH: Whatever decision we make later this year, I will certainly be telling people you’re going to want to be at the festival next year, for sure. Next year is going to be the final one in this current configuration. I believe strongly that whatever city we choose, Sundance will find an exciting new home whether we stay in Utah or move to Boulder or Cincinnati.
RR: Do the political environments of the three states you’re looking at weigh in your decisions, especially as we enter more charged and divisive times?
EH: In traveling to all three cities, there’s a palpable energy, enthusiasm, excitement and desire to bring Sundance to each of these three places — and that crosses party lines. We talk to legislators, local officials, mayors, governors and community organizers, and each of the three cities [is] just as enthusiastic as the next.
RR: Over the years, this festival has evolved from representing a very obscure niche — arthouse — to being a launchpad for a major genre of Hollywood and sort of a farm team for the industry. What is it now? How do you see the role that Sundance plays in the larger firmament?
EH: It’s all of the above. Everything matters, everything counts. The business side of independent film — but also the artistic side — has matured. If we look at, like, 1984-85 as the starting point for this, what you see now is this independent film ecosystem that touches so many different kinds of work, and it is much more international. You have American films that have international scope. You have international films that look at our country, and they do so outside of a more established construct or structure.
There are different opportunities in play for so many of our artists and our job at the festival is just hopefully, to give them the best shot at being seen. It’s not just what films got sold on the first night. For tentpoles, [studios] look to the independent community to find directors for some of that work. Agents are looking for talent to sign. The folks at Pixar send a whole team of folks just to watch short films because they’re looking for talent. The folks at Amblin send a whole team because they’re looking for new talent.
It makes the role of a festival like Sundance even more important.
We also have these labs, the work that Michelle Satter has been doing at the Labs for 40-plus years to nurture and support artists even before they’re ready for the festival, helping to get their scripts in shape. Like Sean Wang’s film Didi from this past year. It’s having a great run this fall and [was] getting some notice in the conversation around the end of the year.
Art houses are coming back right now, which has been amazing. We owe a testament and tribute to independent filmmakers who came from Sundance [and the festival circuit] like Greta Gerwig and Chris Nolan. They’re helping to bring audiences back to the theaters.
But audiences have also evolved in how they look at films and maybe the definitions are a little more gray and malleable. You can watch so many of these films in so many different places. Netflix for one, Hulu for another, being deep champions of work that plays at festivals like Sundance, acquiring films. Netflix acquired multiple documentaries last year at the festival, as did Disney Family and Nat Geo with Sugarcane, which is getting a lot of attention.
RR: So what films, themes or events are you most looking forward to this year?
EH: I’m really excited for for the second night of the festival, when we’re going to celebrate the work of our Labs and honor Michelle Satter, who received the Jean Hersholt Academy Award last year, along with Cynthia Erivo and James Mangold, all artists and creatives who have a connection either to the festival or the wider Institute through our programs.
And there are some really terrific films that I can certainly shout out at you.
RR: Tell me about a couple you’re excited about.
EH: In the U.S. competition, I would encourage you to keep an eye on Hailey Gates, who made Atropia. I think she’s a real breakthrough. She’s someone who people might know from being on the scene in New York. She’s a writer and performer now moving into her directorial debut.
I think there’s a really rare film that you have also in competition called Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), a film by a UCLA graduate student (Sierra Falconer). Talk about a discovery, right? To have a UCLA grad student film in the same festival as Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, or Sophie Hyde with a film like Jimpa. Sophie’s returning to the festival with a very personal story. It stars Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, and Olivia plays a sort of version of Sophie Hyde. She’s a filmmaker. She’s making a movie. Her dad, played by John Lithgow, lives in Amsterdam, and there’s tension between their relationship as father and daughter. He has come out late in life as LGBTQ, and so he has his life with his friends in Amsterdam, and Olivia travels to visit him in Amsterdam with her kid, who is played by Sophie’s real child. So it’s this personal story that is taken from Hyde’s own life with these amazing performances all throughout.
That reminds me of the kind of personal quality of so many of the films. Or in a documentary like Prime Minister, about the (former) Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and some of the footage is literally shot by her husband on like an iPhone, and you so you get this window into what it means to be a world leader. Imagine being in the room as she’s struggling with a decision she has to make. To have that kind of in-person, up-close vantage point is unique. That personal thread is certainly [something] that you could probably find at Sundance year over year, but it’s especially profound this year.
