If you live in a town like Seattle or New York (or any city with a film festival, for that matter), you probably don't realize how lucky you are. After all, you get to see films that people in smaller towns won't see for a year or two -- or, more likely, at all. You also probably don't realize just how much work goes into putting on a film festival, especially one the size of the Seattle International Film Festival, which this year boasts 418 films. Beth Barrett, SIFF's charming and very busy Programming Manager, was kind enough to sit down with me and give me the skinny on what it takes to pull off SIFF. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the anatomy of a film festival:

Cinematical: SIFF is a huge film festival - 418 films this year! Can you tell me a little about what it takes to pull a fest like this off?

Beth Barrett: It's a different kind of festival. SIFF is first and foremost an audience film festival. We exist because the audience exists, as opposed to a market film festival like Berlin or Cannes. One of SIFF's really strong points in terms of distributors and producers and directors is that it offers them a chance to see how the film is going to play in front of an audience that is smart and engaged and is really looking for a cinematical adventure. Our audiences will go see almost anything if it fits their schedule, which is a rigorous adventure all on its own, and they engage and they think about what they're seeing, and they want to know: What were they thinking, and what was the budget, and I saw an element of this, and can you explain? The Q&A's are very smart, and I think that impresses the producers and the directors.

You hear these numbers thrown out all the time, but per capita Seattleites check out more books from the library and watch more movies than anywhere in the country. We are a very literate – and cinematically literate – group of people.

More after the break...

 

Cinematical: And the bulk of the audience for SIFF is local, right?

BB: Absolutely. We do have a number of people coming in from out of town, but it's not the same descending upon that, say, Park City sees for Sundance. And so industry is actually able to see how a movie will play with an audience that is the perfect test audience for them. And they really use that information to plan out releases. It's no wonder that Landmark has seven theaters here. We have the best film audiences in the world here.  It's so big and we have so many different venues that all have their own flavor, and we try to match the films to the venue.

Cinematical: Can you give me a brief, two-minute "history of SIFF"?

BB: This is our 32nd year -- well, we did skip the 13th year, so technically this is our 31st.

Cinematical: Why did you skip 13?

BB: Darryl MacDonald is a superstitious man. He was the exec director for 30 years --  he founded SIFF in 1975 with Dan Ireland; they took over the Moore Theater for a weekend and held the first Seattle International Film Festival. Dan was with the organization for several years, and Darryl was the exec director. And it grew from a weekend, to hiring a few people, to making it four days, to the 25 day marathon that it is for us today. We've been doing the 25 days for almost 20 years now.

Cinematical: And you've been able to sustain a 25 day festival largely because of the audiences?

BB: The audiences and the sponsors. Landmark Theaters -- we've been in Landmark for a long time. They're incredibly supportive of independent film, they're great to work with.  A number of the films that we show at the festival are distributed by companies that work very closely with Landmark -- IFC, Strand Releasing. I'm really interested to find out how (Mark Cuban's distribution ideas) play out.

Cinematical: I'm interested in how some of his ideas will end up shaking up independent film.

BB: Yes -- having a director be an independent distributor. If an independent investor believes in the power of a director's distribution, they may be more likely to hand them over more money.

Cinematical: You have a forum coming up that's on the subject of distribution.

BB: We do. It's the Seattle Summit -- two hours on the 17th. Mike Goodrich is heading up the discussion. It really is about the new money in content creation and distribution. Our intent is to (video) podcast the summit on SIFFcast. That's a really interesting thing that we're really excited about, and trying to figure out how to best get it to play this year.  

Cinematical: As the programming manager, can you tell me a little about what that means and what you do? You're year-round staff, right?

BB: I'm year-round staff. SIFF has 10 year-round staff (programming, development, membership, operations, bookkeeping). We go from 10 year-round staff to, this year we're at almost 100 paid employees, and that doesn't count the almost 1,000 volunteers. It's an enormous undertaking, and everyone just really loves film.

Cinematical: You're in a good town for that. I'm sure you have no shortage of volunteers.

BB: No, it's great. Every year our volunteer numbers rise, and people volunteer to do different things.

Cinematical: Do you have a lot of volunteers who come back  year after year?

BB: Yes, we do. Probably a good 500-600 out of the 800-900 we sign up come back. You can sign up for even just one shift. This year  we're using an online board called Shift Board, so people are able to volunteer for their own shifts; they can just go online and say, hm, that sounds interesting, and they put themselves down for it. .Which is really great. It's a self-managing board. And we can see what still needs to be filled and put out a specific call for people who might be interested in doing that particular thing. It allows the volunteers to be a little more flexible in saying, hey, I'm not doing anything this afternoon, I wonder if they need help. It's great.

Cinematical: SIFF has 418 films this year -- that's a lot of films. Can we talk a little about the screening process and how you pull all that together?

BB: Absolutely. It's a combination of films that get submitted to us and films that programmers see at other festivals or have contact about with distributors.

Cinematical: What's the breakdown, percentage-wise?

BB: About 20% of the films that we screen are submissions. Which I think is actually pretty good. We got 2,500 submissions this year, which is up from 1,400 two years ago. Every year we play more films, so we get more films, and it's a self-replicating cycle. There are ten programmers who meet once a week starting in December. We have 15 volunteer pre-screeners who watch a lot of the submissions. Two pre-screeners will watch a submission and decide if it should move on to the programmers.

Cinematical: How many films did the ten programmers watch?

BB: It's different because different programmers watch different parts. We've got a couple of documentary programmers who watch documentaries, four shorts programmers, two feature programmers. People definitely have niches of films that they like and films that they're going to respond to -- and understand the community that will respond to the film as well.

Cinematical: So you work really hard to target what your programmers are seeing around the types of audiences that will come to see those films.

BB: Exactly. This year we're representing 62 countries. And so we really tried to have a strong, wide, breadth of representation. That said, of course there are always some strong areas that we want to support and that we want to exhibit films from.

Cinematical: Such as?

BB: Well, we like the French  (laughs). Central and Eastern European films -- they're very important films, and in the last 20 years have just grown and changed so much, obviously reflecting the political and social change in Central and Eastern European areas. This year of course, we focused on Denmark, because they're just exploding and they're all over the board. They're really taking chances with their filmmaking.

Cinematical: As programming manager, what are you looking for in a film?

BB:  It's always the story -- always, always the story .There are so many different ways to represent the story. You can do it really low budget, really high budget, silently with just the acting. You can have two people sitting at a table and talking for the entire 90 minutes. That's not as important to me -- obviously, however you've chosen to visually represent your story, you need to do that well. But if there's not a story there, you could spend $15 million on it and if you're not gonna tell a story that we're interested in, it's not worth watching. The characters have to be interesting, the story has to be engaging, there has to be something compelling that you're saying.

Cinematical: Do you see a lot of films that don't have that?

BB: Unfortunately yes. Yes, I do. I see a lot of films that have a ... derivative story, that aren't telling me anything new. I can't tell you how many Reservoir Dogs knock-offs I've seen. You still have to tell a story. If you're not telling anything new or you're not saying anything in an interesting manner, you're not going to engage the audience.

Cinematical: You want to minimize the walkouts.

BB: Yes, absolutely. We don't like walkouts.

Cinematical: It seems there are less walkouts at SIFF than at other festivals, though.

BB:  That's true. Again, commending our audiences, they really are willing to give almost all films the benefit of a doubt. There was actually a really funny interaction at the Conversations with Other Women screening, with the director (Hans Canosa) standing there. A women -- after the first ten minutes she decided she hated the movie. But she stayed the entire time so she could tell him this. So she could tell him what she thought about the film. And he was very gracious about it and was very interested in why she thought that.

Cinematical: Can you talk a little about the financial aspects of the festival?

BB:  We are running a $4 million festival on a budget of about $1.5 million. The other $2.5 comes in the form of in-kind sponsorship. Our website is run and was developed by sponsorship. All our computers, cell phones, all of it is sponsorship. Year-round, development is out getting sponsors, people who want to get involved in the festival. The W Hotel is a sponsor -- they provide space. American Airlines and Alaska Airlines fly guests in, we bring in over 200 guests. Bringing directors in and bringing film-- you can't imagine what a gas surtax does to shipping 75 pounds of film. Landmark is a sponsor or we couldn't be in all the theaters we are. For every $10 seat that an audience member pays for, it costs us $25. Admissions is only 23% of our grand total. And membership is only 2%. It's an enormous undertaking. People really don't understand how much goes into it.

Cinematical: What are some of your favorite films at the festival?

BB: I loved A Soap. I am really excited about Shinobi. I saw a screener at my house and I cannot wait to see it on the big screen. It's sort of a Romeo and Juliet meets special effects, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, soaring-through-the-air thing. It's gorgeous, absolutely heart-breakingly beautiful. (Asian film) is a very strong emphasis at SIFF. I'm really excited about Refugee All-Stars, a documentary about musicians who perform at refugee camps in the Sudan; even though they're living a really hard life, they're trying to bring joy. If you like more midnight craziness – Evil Aliens. And OSS-117. It's a new film --  I'm really excited about it, it looks really fun. Little bit of Austin Powers, little bit of Maxwell Smart. We've got a couple of the New American Cinema films, which are smaller but quite good, like Jordan Albertson's The Standard, which was shot up on Whidbey Island.

Cinematical: Does SIFF give Seattle films preference?

BB: I wouldn't say preference, no. It still has to be a good film, it has to have a good story. We love to support Seattle film, but we're not gonna do it blindly. It's still got to be a good film.