Everything You Need to Know About the New York Film Festival

A scene from last year’s New York Film Festival

Now that the Telluride, Venice and Toronto film festivals are in the rearview, it’s New York’s time to shine. And the New York Film Festival, which begins Friday, September 25, is certainly seizing its moment in the spotlight, kicking off its 52nd year with the world premiere of David Fincher’s eagerly anticipated (and already ecstatically-reviewed) big-screen adaptation of the Gillian Flynn bestseller, Gone Girl. But that’s not the only megawatt exclusive the festival (which is still based at Lincoln Center, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side) has in store for movie lovers: on October 4, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Inherent Vice, will unspool for the first time anywhere, as the festival’s gala Centerpiece presentation.  The festival will close on October 11, with the New York premiere of the Michael Keaton comeback vehicle, Birdman, which previously played Venice and Telluride.

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The combination of having Fincher and Anderson world premieres is a powerful one-two punch that confirms the NYFF’s status as a fall-festival season heavyweight, as well as a marquee destination for films hoping to contend in the end-of-year awards race. Though, as NYFF director Kent Jones, is quick to point out: “It’s hard to think of two guys who are less interested in winning awards.” The same goes, Jones adds, for the festival itself, which he says, strives to stay above the larger Oscar-season fray, during which time prognosticators often keep scorecards about which festival has the strongest awards track record. “That’s something that’s not really connected with us and what we do. It’s incidental to it. Let me put it this way: We didn’t want Gone Girl, Inherent Vice and Birdman because we thought they were going to be awards contenders. Last year, there were plenty of films that won a lot of awards that we had no interest in.”

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NYFF: 1962–2009

That disinterest in awards is programmed into the festival’s very DNA; since its founding in 1962, the NYFF has been a noncompetitive event, declining to hand out prizes like Cannes’ Palme d’Or, Venice’s Golden Lion, or even Toronto’s People’s Choice Award. The other core idea that co-founders Richard Roud and Amos Vogel instilled in the festival from the beginning, was that the main slate would be compromised of movies from around the world — without any grand unifying themes, or a checklist of specific countries. Instead, the programming dictate was to invite the films that the selection committee (which was originally just Roud and Vogel, before expanding to include critics like Andrew Sarris and Susan Sontag) liked best from the past year, often plucked from the international-film-festival circuit. The NYFF’s first edition, which launched at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall in September 1963, boasted an eclectic 21-film lineup that included Luis Buñel’s The Exterminating Angel, Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (below), and Alex Segal’s All the Way Home, one of only two American films in the bunch.

Leon Niemczyk in Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water’ (1962)

In those early years, one of the festival’s primary goals was to solidify the still-shaky perception of cinema as a legitimate artistic medium, by exposing skeptical, Hollywood-saturated uptown New York audiences to the finest in international filmmaking. Roud, who took charge of the festival after Vogel resigned in 1968, was fan of European art cinema, and always found room for directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Robert Bresson. (Godard holds the record for the most films screened at the festival, with 25 and counting.) Sometimes, the reaction from Gotham audiences to these imports was less than positive. Jones attended his first NYFF in 1983, and recalls unruly audiences raising a ruckus during challenging movies like Godard’s Passion. “I remember absolutely unhinged reactions from the audience to those films. They thought they were so weird, and were trying to literally shout them off the screen. Thankfully, people [today] have become more savage and more civilized.”

Roud parted ways with the festival in 1987, and was replaced by Richard Peña, who oversaw an expansion of the festival’s programming selections, welcoming new directors like Pedro Almodóvar and Zhang Yimou, as well as films from new-to-the-festival countries like South Korea and Romania. Peña  also sought to extend the reach of its Lincoln Center homebase with the opening of the Walter Reade Theatre in 1992, followed, two decades later, with the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Jones served on the NYFF selection committee for several years during Peña’s tenure, and was later picked for the director job when Peña stepped down following the NYFF’s 50th anniversary in 2012. He inherited a festival that was in the midst of re-introducing itself to the city, and the world at large, while dealing with an increasingly crowded and competitive landscape. “When the NYFF started, there were only a few film festivals in the country, not to mention the world,” he explains. “Now, it’s like every neighborhood has its own film festival, so they become connoisseur experiences that cater to specialty areas and attitudes. [Whereas,] this has always been a festival that’s stuck to its core idea: That there would be no thematic idea behind the selection of films—it would just be selecting the best films that we’ve seen this year. That’s the reason why the NYFF has to be kind of re-explained.”

NYFF: 2010–TODAY 

The festival’s subtle rebranding started in 2010 when it scored a significant coup by securing the world premiere of another David Fincher film—The Social Network (below)—as its Opening Night event. Since then, the NYFF has balanced its usual slate of acclaimed titles from festivals at home and abroad, with high-profile exclusive premieres; in 2011, they were the first festival to screen My Week with Marilyn, while 2012 saw a trio of world premieres: Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, David Chase’s Not Fade Away and Robert Zemeckis’ Flight. And last year, Captain Phillips, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Her all launched at the NYFF, with Phillips and Her eventually securing Oscar nominations for Best Picture, a track record that bodes well for Gone Girl and Inherent Vice.

Jesse Eisenberg in ‘The Social Network’ (2010)

If the inclusion of these star-studded American premieres seems to clash with the festival’s founding principle to emphasize the finest in international art cinema, Jones would beg to differ. “I used to get very weirded out by discussions from people who thought that avant-garde cinema unveiled the truth and made a mockery of all that false narrative stuff. It never seemed true to me, and that can be seen in the work of a director like David Fincher. He makes movies in a very different way than directors like Godard make movies; he thinks in terms of a big audience, and connecting with as many people as possible. He also happens to make great movies that are as complex as smaller movies. His films, to me, are revelations, Gone Girl included. It’s a revelatory film about couples and certainly about media culture.”

And if you’re one of those who prefer the avant-garde stuff to Fincher, the NYFF 2014 has you covered. This year, Godard is back with his latest experimental feature, Goodbye to Language (trailer below) — and another festival favorite, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, will be screening his newest movie Horse Money (which Jones calls “absolutely staggering”). He’s also excited for audiences to see Argentine director Matías Pineird’s The Princess of France, Nick Broomfield’s latest provocation Tales of the Grim Sleeper, and the BASE-jumping documentary, Sunshine Superman.

For that middle ground between the avant-garde and the mainstream, festival-goers can look to the Sundance hit Whiplash; the Marion Cotillard drama Two Days, One Night; and David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire, Maps to the Stars. And there are also many different paths they can travel down apart from what’s on the main slate. A separate documentary program includes Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, the follow-up to his acclaimed debut, The Act of Killing.

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There’s also: a 20-film retrospective devoted to Hollywood legend, Joseph L. Mankiewicz; the experimental series “Projections;” a series of special events, including a 30th-anniversary screening of This is Spinal Tap; and and a pair of “An Evening With…” dinner events honoring Ethan Hawke and Richard Gere, both of whom have movies playing at the festival—Seymour: An Introduction and Time Out of Mind, respectively. Perhaps most excitingly, the NYFF just announced that it would holding another surprise screening of a previously unannounced movie; in the past, these sneak previews have included Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. The only hint that the festival is providing at present is that the film will be a 2015 release by a “New York Film Festival favorite,” so buy your tickets and start your speculation…now.

Photo credits: 20th Century Fox, Rob Kim/Getty Images, Everett, Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Watch a quick video history of the New York Film Festival below: