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Tribeca Film Fest Directors Speak Out
Freccero’s focus is on content production, the website and special events. Schafer, who has been with the festival since it began in 2002, is in charge of logistics and oversees film programming with Peter Scarlet, the artistic director. Tribeca Trib editor Carl Glassman spoke to Freccero and Schafer about this, the 7th annual festival and its relationship to the Downtown community. TRIB: What will be different about the festival this year? NANCY SCHAFER Paola and I set out to just make it easier, through a smaller program—there were 159 features screened last year, we’re going to have 125 or so this year—easier and less expensive ticket packages, and easier navigation on the Web so people can figure out what they’re going to see. PAOLA FRECCERO You can send a text message and e-mails to us to get information about films. And there are just two hubs— Tribeca and Union Square. You don’t have to commute around the whole city. TRIB A response to feedback you were getting about recent festivals? SCHAFER It’s sort of normal growing pains that we’ve been going through for the past couple of years and we came in and had some ideas of how we wanted to fix those growing pains. FRECCERO Venues are a perfect example. It was really clear a couple of years ago that the venues in Tribeca could no longer contain the festival. It had gotten too big. So we said, “Let’s expand.” We did a deal with AMC [theaters] and we were so concentrated on how many theaters we could bring the festival to outside of Tribeca, but still make it feel like it’s part of Tribeca. The next year [we realized] we have to concentrate it in as few theaters as possible. We refined it more and this year refined it even further. Now we have two central hubs. TRIB Most of the movies aren’t shown in Tribeca. The majority are in Union Square. So isn’t it a stretch to still call this the Tribeca Film Festival? SCHAFER I loved the first four years. If we could be down here in that way we would be. We want it to be a walk-in festival where people see each other on the street and talk about films. It’s not realistic now. It’s a matter of space. We used to have 3,000 people at a time on that plaza [outside Regal Cinemas in Battery Park City] and we can’t right now. FRECCERO You have to remember that the exhibition business is a hit-driven one so there came a time when Regal said to us, “You guys are having trouble managing the vast numbers of people that you have coming in here. We still have to make sure we have theaters available to book on the commercial circuit. Let’s reexamine what our relationship looks like.” If [the construction of the Goldman Sachs tower next door] gets finished and Regal is as welcoming to us as they have been in the past and we can fit 3,000 people into that teeny tiny space, or somebody else builds another space, we’d be thrilled. SCHAFER But we still do a lot Downtown. All the premieres are down here, so the press is all hanging out and feeling very Tribeca-y and sending that message out into the world. Then we do all the community stuff here, which is important to us. There are films showing at Tribeca Performing Arts Center all the time and at Pace. TRIB Some residents see the festival as an incursion into the neighborhood. What do you say to them? SCHAFER Look, I know how much stuff goes on down here and how this neighborhood is so iconic that it’s constantly being used as a shooting location and we’re just another thing that gets in the way. I know there’s a lot of that sentiment in the neighborhood. But do I think the neighborhood can engage constantly during the 11 days? They completely can. FRECCERO I’d think residents would say, “Okay, Tribeca is in town, let’s at least have some fun in exchange for the fact that our streets are going to be closed and there’s going to be random people walking around asking us for directions for the 800th time.” It may be one of those things that, as classic New Yorkers, we have so much in our backyard that we find it almost overwhelming to take advantage of what’s there. But I would hope the neighborhood still feels like, how cool that I get to go to a film festival by walking five blocks.
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