Telluride Takeaways: From Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti's 'Debut' to Nathan Fielder's Audacious Dare to the Doc Branch

What the Telluride Film Festival Taught Us About the Oscar Race

As I reflect on my weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, the one thing that stands out is how much the festival's unique atmosphere influences the way we think about movies and awards. It's not just a showcase for new films — it's a gathering of cinephiles, actors, and industry folks who live and breathe cinema.

On my last morning in Telluride, halfway through breakfast at Butcher & Baker, Kenneth Branagh stopped at the table on his way to a Q&A for “Into the Breach,” the National Theatre documentary he produced. He had a story. A night earlier, he'd ridden the gondola up in pitch darkness with Willem Dafoe, Tom Hiddleston and Andrew Scott — four of the best actors alive, each with a film at the festival, sealed in one cable car with nothing to look at and nothing to do but talk. All anyone could hear was Dafoe. Branagh, laughing, called it "the wisdom of Willem." A voice in the dark, no face attached.

I half-believed it until a few hours later, waiting out my flight at Montrose, when I ran into Hiddleston on his way back to the U.K. He told the same story, unprompted. That's the festival — the kind of storytelling that makes the Oscars feel like a distant afterthought in comparison.

Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti's 'The Debut' Makes a Statement

Jesse Eisenberg's third feature behind the camera premiered Saturday night, becoming the hottest ticket in town by the next day. “The Debut” drops Moore's Mona, a meek suburban homemaker who lands a bit part in a community theater musical, into the front of the best actress race. It's the funniest, warmest thing she's done in years. Giamatti, whom Eisenberg calls his “favorite actor,” plays the tyrant director shaping her. During one rehearsal scene between them — a master-class, no other word for it — the Telluride crowd applauded in the middle of the movie. You rarely see that happen once at a festival. It happened again before the credits.

Moore already has an Oscar for “Still Alice,” and she's the one to beat. Giamatti is the sentimental story coming up underneath: twice nominated for “Cinderella Man” and “The Holdovers,” never a winner and here he is doing the loosest work of his late career in a supporting turn built to be embraced. Eisenberg wrote seven songs for the fictional show. The one they'll push is “This City May Have Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn't Spit Me Out),” which Moore performs, and it's headed for a best original song campaign.

Nathan Fielder Attempts the Impossible with 'You Can See Everything'

The festival's best-kept secret came Sunday night, when ticket holders filed into the Werner Herzog Theatre with their phones locked away for “You Can See Everything,” the Elizabeth Holmes documentary Fielder co-directed with Lance Oppenheim. Holmes invites Fielder and his skeptical crew to film her in the 34 days before she reports to prison. The shoot spirals into a three-year descent. Portions are recreated with an A-list actor who is eligible for Oscar attention, though not SAG.

Now comes the hard part — which is the documentary branch, which has never embraced this kind of nonfiction filmmaking. Voters who prize the observational and the sincere tend to bristle at a movie where the filmmaker is this present and this implicated. The circus around Fielder guarantees the kind of coverage most nonfiction contenders would trade a lung for. Whether the branch rewards it is the whole question. Nobody has made a movie quite like this. Almost nobody has won an Oscar for one.

'Club Kid' Has a Real Play for the Old Guard

Jordan Firstman's directorial debut had its North American premiere Friday, and its trajectory keeps getting more serious than anyone bet on. Firstman writes, directs and stars as Peter, a washed-up New York party promoter whose life on the dance floor stops cold when the 10-year-old son he never knew about (British newcomer Reggie Absolom) turns up at his door.

Strip away the club scene and the online-comedian brand, and you have a classically built story about a man-child being handed a kid. I expected that this would struggle to appeal to the older industry demographic. I was wrong. In fact, it seems to register incredibly well with older Academy voters, at least the ones I chatted with on the mountain.

"I always say, always hire somebody funny to do something dramatic, because you'll get so many interesting things," veteran actor Colleen Camp said at the post-screening Q&A. "And what [Firstman] did in this movie is even in the most dramatic moments, they're brilliantly ironic and they're funny."

Firstman described how his script reversed course on him over two years of writing. “I started the script from kind of a cynical place of looking around at the scene and just not feeling good about it — looking at the excessive drug use and the sex, and being a part of it and feeling bad about myself and feeling bad about my community,” he said. “What happened was that making this film in the community — we shot at real parties, in the queer spaces in New York — my empathy really opened up in the production of the film.” That shift is on the screen, and it's what voters will feel without necessarily being able to name it.

By the end of the panel, it came down to one word, spoken loudly by Firstman: “love.”

'La Bola Negra' Commands the Room

Respect is the currency at that altitude, and Los Javis have it. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi arrived off a Cannes run that ended with the directing prize, and the Telluride word-of-mouth only got louder. Chris Pine, Sofia Coppola, Rian Johnson and their Netflix stablemate Danny Boyle (“Ink”) all turned up for the screening.

Shot on 35 mm and inspired by the unfinished Federico García Lorca work of the same name, “La Bola Negra” moves across 1932, 1937 and 2017, tracing three generations of gay men through nearly a century of Spanish history.

A subtitled Netflix title the festival can't stop buzzing about is exactly where you want to be heading into the international feature race, and the streamer is hunting well beyond that category. And even though stars Guitarricadelafuente and Penélope Cruz weren't on the mountain, the film played so well that it shows it can exist in the awards echo chamber without them (which says a lot).

'Wild Horse Nine' Made the Two-Stop Drop Look Easy

Of the titles that ran the Venice-to-Telluride relay this year, Martin McDonagh's landed with the most confidence. Searchlight Pictures' “Wild Horse Nine” bowed in Venice competition on Sept. 3 to a 13-minute standing ovation, the Lido's first real roar of the fall. Two days later, it turned up as Telluride's surprise patron screening, timed to John Malkovich's Silver Medallion tribute.

Malkovich was the biggest takeaway. Twice nominated and never a winner, he called the script the kind you see “every 25 years.” The double premiere vaulted him near the front of best actor, trailing only Matt Damon in “The Odyssey” and another Telluride player, Andrew Scott in “Elsinore.” Sam Rockwell, who won supporting actor for his last McDonagh outing, is back in that conversation, with the open question of whether Steve Buscemi joins him.

'Tender Loving Care' Is Mike Leigh in a Minor Key

If this is the last Mike Leigh film, and the final shot plays like a man who knows it might be, it's a hell of a way to leave. “Tender Loving Care” follows two social workers and was built the usual Leigh way: no script, no plot, just months of assembling people until they exist.

Marion Bailey, who plays Birdie, figured out the assignment before the assignment existed. “I could see as he was going through, he was crossing off people and I thought, what's the sort of person he's looking for? And then it dawned on me — he's looking for someone who has a sense of humor,” she said. “The ones he was crossing off my list were people who don't have a sense of humor.” Then she added the part only a Leigh veteran gets to add: “You get a call from Mike to say, 'Do you want to come on board? I don't know what the part will be. I'm not sure how it'll work out, but would you like to do it?' Yes, please. You don't even stop to think about it.”

The film's dedication to Dick Pope hangs over it, and longtime producer Georgina Lowe explained how the succession happened. Lucy, who came up under Pope as a camera trainee on “Meantime” and operated on “Hard Truths,” took over the cinematography after a British Society of Cinematographers function where Pope received a posthumous lifetime achievement award. “I don't think Mike heard this, but Pat turned to Lucy and said, 'You should shoot the next one,'” Lowe said. “Simultaneously, Mike had thought that. It just made total sense.”

Paul Jesson gave the film its thesis in a single line, asking what a movie about caring for people means right now. “It's also a good antidote to a world which, by and large, is being run by bullies and thugs,” he said. “The state of the world at the moment is pretty terrifying, really. A lot of people try to close their eyes, cover their ears and get on with their own private lives. And it's hard to know what to do apart from that, other than look after the people they're close to.” That's the movie, and the campaign.

Everybody Wrote a Love Letter to Acting This Year

Step back from the horse race and the weekend had a through-line: acting itself, in films made largely by and for the people who do it. Two of the marquee titles orbit the same building. “Elsinore” is Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson in the last year of his life, holding on long enough to play Hamlet at London's National Theatre. “Into the Breach,” the documentary Branagh produced, tells the story of that same theater, with Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman and Ian McKellen around a table sorting out what the stage cost them and what it gave back. One film stages a great actor's final bow. The other rounds up living legends to explain why it mattered.

“The Debut” is the same subject from the bottom of the ladder: Moore as a suburban nobody who discovers, in a community theater musical, that performing might be the truest thing she's ever done and nearly comes apart proving it. A drama, a doc and a comedy, all circling what it costs to disappear into someone else.

The actors branch is the largest bloc in the Academy, and nothing moves a room of performers like a film that treats performance as life or death. Telluride just handed them three.

The Gondola Is the Place to Get Honest Polls

Nothing tells you how ticket holders are responding to a movie like a gondola ride to or from the Chuck Jones Theatre. On a ride up Sunday morning, you get to listen to the festival unfiltered, which, of course, came with the secret screening speculation that swung from a Frank Ocean project to the eventual Fielder documentary. But then you get to hear about people's reactions to the Bill Gates talk at Elks Park that half the car caught the tail end of, and the running argument over which “Martin McDonagh is the real Martin McDonagh.” (Whatever that means?)

"I felt that it was long, but I was never bored," one producer said. "I was pretty engaged. It felt pretty robust the whole time." That distinction can matter most.

Interestingly, I spoke to someone else immediately after getting off the gondola who said “Fjord” is the best thing they've seen this year.

The pendulum can swing rapidly between voters and titles.

Other Notes from the Mountain

Stephen Beresford, who wrote “Elsinore,” lost his passport and couldn't make it to Telluride. That didn't stop his leading man from having a moment.

Andrew Scott had company for that reaction. After the screening, Oprah Winfrey, a Telluride regular this year behind Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's “Everest: The Other Side,” found Scott outside and cried in his arms. If you want to know how a movie is landing on the mountain, watch for who's weeping in the lobby or outside.

Winfrey also threw a party, and by the chatter, all anyone could talk about was who got the invite, who didn't and how you could possibly get one. Spoiler alert: I wasn't one of them.