What happened to Pippa at the Toronto Film Festival

rebecca — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:11:51 +0000

Toronto turned out to be one of those shards of light that illuminate the days around them, before and after. I wasn’t expecting much, because there are so many films in Toronto, I figured the audience was a little tired by the 15th of September, it had gone well in Deauville, and…I don’t know, I always arm myself against indifference or plain old rejection in any screening. But the response to the film was very strong. The audience of 2000 got all the laughs, from the beginning, and they seemed to take such delight in the performances. All the risks in tone change and performance–especially on the part of Winona and Maria Bello, who needed to hit the biggest notes– seemed to pay off. So it worked with that audience, anyway–there was a long standing ovation at the end, and I got reports of people being moved. Two days later, there was a smaller, daytime screening, and, though the spirit of the screening was calmer, the laughs were in the same places, and people came up and told me it meant something to them personally. The main thing, to me, is that Robin’s sublime performance is beginning to get the attention it deserves. I really think that she has done something so rare, she has somehow infused a characterization with a soul. You look at Pippa and you see her spirit flickering in there…

My First Blog

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:02:01 +0000

This is my first blog. It’s very exciting. I think of my audience as a series of individuals rather than a mass, maybe because relatively speaking I have always had a pretty small audience. Somehow this feels like a somewhat personal way of reaching you, whoever you are.

The next months will be exciting and hard. The cycle of work that is The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is coming to final fruition–there was the novel, the screenplay, making the film, and now at last, the film is coming out–and the book is emerging in paperback in the US. It’s been 8 years since I started thinking about Pippa as a character and five years since I started writing in earnest.

The film will be a limited release initially, New York and LA, and I have a feeling a lot of the audience may be women in the south or midwest. So we–Screen Media (distributor), me, Lemore Syvan, Dede Gardner (producers) are going to struggle to reach them by whatever means we can.

It’s doing pretty well in England–been out for more than a month, anyway, and in Greece, inexplicably, it opened number three, ahead of Transformers, and behind the Hangover and IceAge. What I wonder is, how did the Greek distributors sell it?

Rebecca Miller » Pippa Lee

What happened to Pippa at the Toronto Film Festival

My First Blog