Sundance 2009: Jonathan Levine talks Sundance

Jonathan Levine, director and writer of “The Wackness” sits down and talks about Sundance with us..

Since Sundance is going on right now, Scott asked me to reflect on my Sundance experience from last year, when my film “The Wackness” premiered. With a year’s hindsight, the experience was pretty awesome.
At the time it was, well, intense. First of all, as soon as we got there and moved into our condo, everyone got sick. Once everyone was good and sick, we had our premiere. As it was the first time we’d screened the movie for anyone, the premiere was nerve-wracking for me. Add to that the pressure of finding a distributor, and the fact that Quentin Tarantino was in the audience, and I was a total mess. Luckily, it went well. The audience seemed to like it, and at the party afterwards a few distributors expressed interest. So we partied. I didn’t think I drank a lot, but the altitude makes you get drunk faster, so I guess I got kinda drunk.

The next morning, after waking up hungover (I think I took my shirt off, and I can’t remember if I said anything inappropriate to Harvey Weinstein), we did a lot of press, walking down Main Street with our cast, having fun with Sir Ben and Method. (the coolest dude in the world, but when an old white photographer lady called him “Mos”, he did not respond well). At this point, we still didn’t have a distributor. I was confused and a little bummed, because my first film (which, ironically, still has not been released in the US), sold the
night it premiered for a lot of dough. This seemed to be a much tougher road. Then came our Eccles screening. It was magical. You could feel a great energy in the room, reverberating all the way to the back of the giant theater. When the movie ended and we got a standing ovation. Â  It was one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever experienced.

That’s the thing about Sundance: if you get caught up in distributors reactions and parties and seeing Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian (I don’t know who she is but I think she’s like Paris Hilston) and all that, you will have a miserable time. But beyond all that, there’s a moment when the lights go down, when an audience is watching your movie—that’s electric. The audiences there are incredible: loving, curious, generous. (I’d like to take a time out from this posting to recognize the fact that Obama became president today. That makes everything better.)

As the days wore on, me and the producers met with some distributors. The tide of public opinion was helping generate more interest in our film, and I was starting to feel a little better, primarily due to the
fact that companies were giving me free shit like shoes and furry hats. So we met a few different companies at our condo. We weren’t in a rush. We wanted to find the right people, because we had been burned
before. Within a few days, we had made a deal with Sony Classics, and we were very happy with them and their intentions for our film. A few days later, we won the Audience Award.

It had been a whirlwind week, and although I felt like we got beat up a bit at the beginning and then drove triumphantly into the sunset, neither of those things were true. We were in a little bubble known as
Park City, where things seemed much more intense than in the “real world”. What was important was that we were there in the first place. We got to hang out with our friends, with festival programmers. We got
to watch and talk movies. We got to connect with the audience, an audience that likes their movies different, challenging, unique. If you look at the weekly box office charts, you’ll see that the rest of
the world doesn’t always feel that way. That’s why Sundance is so important: to remind us that the best of American movies, and of all cinema, are films that have a uniqueness of voice and vision. A year
later, I miss it. I’ve been reading about what sounds like a crop of great films, from “500 Days of Summer” to “Push” to “Black Dynamite” to “Don’t Let me Drown”. I can’t wait to see all the wonderful new voices launched by this festival. That’s why Sundance is essential. And that’s why it’s good. Â  Also people there give you free shit. That is also good.