TORONTO – It was business as usual at TIFF on the morning of September 11, 2001. Stars like Ryan Gosling, Benjamin Bratt and Heather Graham were settling in for a day of doing interviews about their films.
Actor Harvey Keitel, at TIFF for the premiere of The Grey Zone, broke the silence in a foyer at the InterContinental Hotel on Bloor Street. “Have you heard what happened? Have you heard?”
People gathered around TV sets to watch news coverage of the horror unfolding south of the border.
At the TIFF press centre inside the Park Hyatt hotel, a handwritten sign read: “Due to the tragedies unfolding in the U.S.A. all press conferences for today are cancelled!!”
Festival organizers held a press conference at noon where director Piers Handling spoke. “I think we’re all in shock right now and we’re all trying to work through what this actually means. It’s not business as usual right now, and I don’t know when it will be business as usual.”
Screenings of films like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Hotel were cancelled, as was the night’s only scheduled TIFF party, Celluloid Celebration. The Windsor Arms Hotel, which was to host the annual InStyle party, donated the food to homeless shelters instead.
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Handling has recalled that there were discussions about cancelling the entire festival. Instead, organizers agreed to keep showing films but to remove the “glitz and glamour” from the festival — no red carpets, pre-show sponsor acknowledgements or after-parties.
“I think that was absolutely the right thing to do,” he said. Trauma response counsellor Bryan Prettie was hired to help TIFF guests and staff cope with what was happening.
Meanwhile stars who were in the city for TIFF scrambled to find ways out. Glenn Close, in town for The Safety of Objects, and Heather Graham, at the festival promoting From Hell, rented cars and drove home to New York. Mulholland Dr. director David Lynch coordinated rental of a bus that would take TIFF guests back to Los Angeles.
Benjamin Bratt, in Toronto to promote his film Pinero at the time, politely chastised fans who approached him outside the Four Seasons hotel, refusing to sign autographs out of respect for “the people who are hurting.” Bratt is at TIFF this week to support The Lesser Blessed.
Mark Wahlberg, who was scheduled to be on one of the doomed planes, was grateful to be in Toronto on September 11. “I left Boston a week earlier,” he has recalled. “My friends and I decided to charter a plane and go up to see a friend’s film at the Toronto Film Festival.”
When screenings resumed on September 13, audiences came out in force. There was a moment of silence before Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding.
“People just wanted to be together,” recalled Nair, who was at TIFF this year to present The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a film about a Pakistani man whose life is changed by the events of 9/11.
In the first couple of years following 9/11, some American studios didn’t want their films screened at TIFF on September 11 and very few stars wanted to attend events where they would be seen celebrating. Today, life at TIFF is mostly back to normal — although no one has forgotten what happened.
BOX OFFICE REVENUES FOR 9/11 MOVIES
- Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) – $222.5 million
- World Trade Center (2006) – $163 million
- United 93 (2006) – $76.3 million
- In the Valley of Elah (2007) – $29.5 million
Source: BoxOfficeMojo.com
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