This month, the very last EbertFest took place in downtown Champaign, Illinois, in the magnificent Virginia Theater, a 1000-seat venue that’s over a century old.
Originally known as The Overlooked Film Festival, EbertFest ran for 25 years, starting in 2001. It was founded by Roger Ebert and his wife and partner Chaz Ebert (who also founded this site; Chaz is the publisher) and directed by their friend Nate Kohn, a professor at the University of Georgia and associate director of the Peabody Awards. I attended most of the festivals after that as a panelist and moderator, and more importantly, as a movie fan and a representative of this site.
Each time, the event would be documented by a team from Shatterglass, a Champaign-based production company founded and run by Luke Boyce and Brett Hays. Luke interviewed festival guests, myself included, in a small, well-lit area backstage. I am pretty sure I first sat for an interview with Luke in 2013. I have done many more interviews with him since, about festival lineups, specific movies and guests, and the overall experience of EbertFest. Luke recently directed and co-wrote the excellent feature-length documentary “The Last Movie Critic,” which retells Roger Ebert’s life story by delving into a few of the films that were most dear to him; it premiered at the final EbertFest, a bittersweet experience, I’m sure.
The final festival concluded with a screening of Rob Reiner’s 1996 romantic comedy “The American President.” This, too, was bittersweet: the late Rob Reiner was supposed to attend to close things out, and the feature was preceded by a lovely clip reel in his honor. There was also a theatrical presentation, a first: a presentation of Siskel/Ebert, a play by Chicago’s Kaitlin Schneider about Roger’s TV partnership with critic Gene Siskel.
At the very end, when the theater was empty, Luke asked if I would do one last interview with him, speaking as someone “who’s been here for many, many years [and] loves Roger as much as anybody here, [about] what this festival has meant, and what it means to be here now.”
I agreed. When I thought about it afterward, I realized it addressed issues that resonate beyond this festival, so we’re publishing a lightly edited transcript here. Luke, if you’re reading this, thanks for being such a good friend and an interviewer who brings out the best in me.
(You can see the full, uncut interview below.)
When I arrived at the airport and took a Lyft to the Virginia Theater for what would be the last EbertFest—or so I’m told—the driver asked what EbertFest was, because he’d only moved here a couple of years ago. He knew about it. He knew it was kind of a big deal. But he didn’t know what it was. And I thought, gosh, how do I put it as simply and concisely as possible?
What I told him was, it’s a film festival where the only criterion for selection is do the people who run the festival love the movie, and do they believe that the movie will engage the audience, like involve them, grip them, move them in some way. And that’s it.
No deals are made here, I don’t think. There’s nobody running out with their cell phone to go tell their assistant to submit a bid to someone about something. That just doesn’t happen here. In any given year, probably the majority of the films being shown are, as they would say, past their sell-by date. That’s how you talk about film when you think of it as a business only, not as an art form.
And here is this incredible utopian little bubble where that doesn’t matter. Nobody talks that way. What they talk about is: What is the film saying? What is the worldview of this film? What are the values of this film? Does it stir the heart? Does it make you feel connected to other people, including—and perhaps most importantly—people you’ve never met? Does it take you to places you’ve never been? Does it help you understand what a life is like that you, prior to seeing the film, could never have imagined?
That’s probably the thing that binds all of the movies that have played here. I can’t think of a single movie that’s played here that I saw that I didn’t like, or that I didn’t find at least interesting, really, really engrossing.
The audience is great. It’s like a religious pilgrimage that happens once a year. They come here to this magic, enchanted place, this temple, and they sit in the dark, and they watch revelations unfold on the screen. And I’ve had so many of those here. The very first EbertFest that I attended was—God, I want to say 2009 or something.
I remember sitting there watching “Synecdoche, New York” and feeling like I was in the movie, somehow. I didn’t feel like I was watching a movie. I felt like I was having a dream. And specifically, I was having someone else’s dream.
If someone were to ask me, in one line, what movies are like, I would say they are an art form that lets you share other people’s dreams and experience other people’s thoughts. There’s a great quote from Roger—which I’m going to paraphrase really poorly, probably—where he talked about the mechanical aspects of cinema as it has always been presented, which is: you sit in the dark, which is what you do mentally when you meditate; when you take a moment, you clear your head; you clear your head of everything that’s extraneous. And you receive things that were not there before. You open yourself up.
This final festival has been really remarkable. I [initially] had some concerns, like, “Oh, only two days? Gee.” But they said everything they needed to say with this group of films. And the new documentary on Roger Ebert [“The Last Movie Critic,” directed by the interviewer] was probably my favorite of all the things I saw here, because it made me think about my own role in this ecosystem, however small or large it may be—what my role is, or what it should be.
It’s a garden. And I’m supposed to be taking care of the plants here. I’m supposed to be making sure that these lovely, lovely things have as long a life as they possibly can, and that the seeds that have just been planted grow into something.
It reminded me of what movies are to most people: they are stories that make them think, feel, and reflect on themselves, and see themselves in individuals who, superficially, are not like them, but in really deep and basic ways are exactly like them.
I’ve seen so many movies here where the people have almost nothing in common with me, except we’re made of the same basic genetic material, you know? I don’t have anything in common with the characters in “The American President.” I don’t have anything in common with the characters in “Bob Trevino Likes It,” which is another of my favorite movies that played this year. And yet I have everything in common with them.
I think the most important thing I got out of this last festival was a recommitment to the important part of being a critic, which is: you’re trying to connect people to things that will enlighten them, enrich them, and challenge them in some way—actively. Things that they’re going to engage with, that they’re going to make a decision to engage with. Not something that they’re going to consume like a bag of chips and never think about again.
The movies that people value, that they celebrate and acknowledge by hanging posters on their wall or buying the deluxe Blu-ray, are not the movies that just go in one ear and out the other, and through your eyes and out the back of your head. They’re the movies that have something new to give you every single time you watch them.
One example of that for me was “Mi Familia,” which I reviewed as a critic for Dallas Observer in 1994, when it opened, 32 years ago. The main thing that moved me about that film at the time is the same thing that moved me [when it screened at EbertFest] this time: all the characters are so open. They are transparent. You can see the gears turning in their heads and in their hearts as you watch this movie.
I told Gregory Nava, the film’s director, about this. I said, “Nothing about that movie is cool. It’s not trying to be cool. It’s not trying to be hip. It’s not trying to get a rise out of anyone. It’s not trying to break any taboos. It’s not about any of that superficial stuff. It’s about saying, ‘Hey, you have parents. You have children, possibly, or even grandchildren. You have a mate, or maybe you don’t. You’ve lost people for all kinds of reasons, you know. Natural causes and unnatural ones.”
And, most importantly, speaking as somebody who is coming up on 60 in a few years, the film is a warning to you that the days are long but the years are short.
One activity which, for me, makes the passage of time sting less is the act of watching a movie. Because, to paraphrase Roger again, the really great movies are the ones where you watch it the first time and you identify with one character or one aspect of the film, and then you see it again, and you’re looking at something else.
[When] I watched “Mi Familia” the first time, the part of the movie that moved me the most was the journey of the Jimmy Smits character, who [because of his older brother being shot by police years earlier] was carrying a lot of trauma, and a lot of unacknowledged anger that he didn’t have the tools to really address, even if he were willing to address them, which he’s not. Superficially, I’m nothing like that guy. But I looked at that guy, and I went, “That’s me. That’s me.”
And this time, when I was looking at the grandparents in that final scene, that was the scene this time where I went, “Oh my God, that’s me.” They’re sitting there with wrinkles on their faces and gray in their hair. And they have lost people. They have suffered so many tragedies, gotten through so many things that are just not fair, that don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason. I remember when I first saw the film, in my 20s, and I thought, among other things, “Oh my God, what a rough life they had.” And when they said, “Yes, we’ve been very lucky,” that was one part of the movie that I thought kind of rang false. They weren’t lucky.
Now I’m looking at it [again] and going, “Yeah, yeahˆthey were lucky. They were lucky. That’s 32 years, right? That’s 32 years of living that gets you to that conclusion. What other festivals not only do that, but do that on purpose?
I said in an earlier interview that I did with you that Roger was not just a man, and he was not just a critic; he was an idea. He is an idea. He exists in the present tense. And Roger’s core idea is that the world doesn’t begin and end with you. Other people exist, and you should care about them, even if you’ve never met them. You should try to understand them even if you didn’t know they existed five minutes ago.
That’s the basic building block of civilization. There are many people, including many colleagues in my profession, who think that’s sentimental. They think it’s corny. They think it’s cringe. And it’s not. It’s the purpose of art, and it’s the purpose of life.
I’ve emerged from this last festival recharged and ready to go out there and continue the work that Roger did—work that meant so much to me, that led me into this profession, which is to remind us that movies are machines that generate empathy. And, boy, do we need empathy right now. We need it so badly!
Stevie Wonder, in one of my favorite songs on my favorite Stevie Wonder album, Songs in the Key of Life, says, “Love’s in Need of Love Today.” As a kid, I didn’t understand that. What does that mean? “Hate’s going round, breaking every heart. We have to stop it, please, before it’s gone too far.” I get that now. You know, it’s very, very easy to find anger, edginess, nihilism, a blasé “I don’t give a damn” kind of attitude [and] posture, [and] to find it cool, to find it exciting. Being decent is not really exciting. It’s not sexy in the way that being bad is. But it’s way more important, because one way of looking at the world is destructive, and the other one is an act of creation, and cementing bonds that already exist.
In another one of Roger’s favorite films, “Do the Right Thing,” there’s a great scene—which of course is a reference to another great movie, “The Night of the Hunter”—where Radio Raheem tells the story of Love and Hate, and they’re fighting each other the whole time. We can’t just stand on the sidelines. You know, you’ve got to do the non-sexy thing, the non-cool thing, which is be decent. Just be decent.
Roger also said that when he cries during a movie, it’s often not because of something sad that happens. It’s because some character did some kind thing. They demonstrated kindness. That’s what moved him, and that’s usually what moves me, too. I don’t cry in a movie when a character dies, but I might cry when one of the survivors approaches another survivor and gives them a memento of the person who’s gone now, and says, “They would have wanted you to have this.”
I’m hugely moved now, after the conclusion of the final screening of the final EbertFest, because this is one last gift from Roger. Chaz made sure we received it and kept it going. And we owe it to Roger and Chaz to go out there and spread the word.
