Haute Living: Do you still enjoy big-budget films?
John Cooper: I do! I do keep up, and I also watch a lot of TV. I think they both are important, especially cable television, which is very good right now. I watch a lot of HBO, and oddly enough, a lot of the filmmakers that we have launched at Sundance worked as directors for HBO. It kind of makes sense; it’s good, fast work for the directors, and then they can take time to do movies.
HL: You talk a lot about the harnessing the power of technology. Can you tell me a little bit more about how Sundance is doing so?
JC: The film industry is in quite a bit of a flux right now, just like the music industry was when everything was crashing and burning. Like Miramax—a company that you always thought would be around. The film industry is facing with the same equation right now. You have an audience that is hungry for interesting work and you have artists who are making it. The question of “How do you connect the two?” is part of what Sundance does.
Right now, we are looking at how the Sundance brand can play in helping people find work after the festival. We are a filter in some ways and an endorser of certain types of movies. I still think, in my heart, that a lot of people are like me. We don’t want to watch independent films all of the time, but there is a place in our life where we want to have different kinds of film. Personally, I will see a big budget movie and I will enjoy it (although I like it less and less, because they are less original than they used to be). I remember watching Batman and thinking, “This is a fun movie.” It was scary and it did what a big-budget movie is supposed to do. Dream Girls sort of did that for me.
So at Sundance, we are looking to bring in partnerships and voices that could help. The self-distribution models that use the Internet that are popping up is the best news for an indie filmmaker. But it is confusing. The marketing is still a problem, because making and marketing the film is still expensive. Just because it is online doesn’t mean that it is cheap. But we help our filmmakers find good opportunities. We test out the different outlets and do all kinds of crazy experiments. For example, YouTube was one of our sponsors this year. At the festival, they launched a new YouTube streaming aspect. [Editor’s note: YouTube made five films from the 2010 and 2009 festivals available for rent for U.S. users for the duration of the festival.] We have worked with iTunes before, and we did a project some years ago getting filmmakers to make films for cell phones—just kind of crazy ideas of where entertainment is going and trying to keep up with it. It is a younger filmmaker community, and they are embracing technology. It has to be a part of our world as well.
HL: Does Sundance also do fundraising online?
JC: We are starting on the web realm. I oversee the web development, and that’s part of it. It entails engaging people with the festival. You can’t just ask people for money, you have to engage them first. We have a company that deals with our website—Blue State Digital, which also did the Obama campaign. It is an expert in getting people to believe in your mission, and hopefully once the people believe, they throw in some money. It is really very simple.
For fundraising, we also have the sponsors, and we are very lucky. Our sponsors give good money. But in this crisis, if our sponsors didn’t already believe in us, we would have lost a lot of them. But our sponsors stayed with us because they already understood what we do. There was that time a couple of years ago where people just gave away money to have their names attached to something, but now I think the sponsors, as well as people in general, are thinking a little bit harder about where there money is going and what it is really doing. So we have to keep our stories pure and clean to draw them in. Our sponsorship levels were good this year; they stayed the same, if not increased, from years before. In this economy, support for the arts is one of the first things to go. What I have to do is tell people, yeah, it may seem like the arts are unimportant right now, but they are not. This is how people are told stories of their times. Films are a very important medium for letting people know what is going on in the world, and I don’t mean literally, like a documentary, but just how people are feeling in general. I think storytellers are a very underrated in their importance to society.
Come back tomorrow for the conclusion of the interview, in which Cooper discusses this year’s winners and his personal favorites from the 2010 festival.
