Venice Film Festival honcho Alberto Barbera to Vanity Fair‘s Rebecca Ford on (a) Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, (b) Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie a Deux and (c) the all-but-total diminishment, prestige and award-season-wise, of the Toronto Film Festival:

Barbera on Queer: “It’s not an easy film. It’s very bold.” HE translation: Gushings of gay sex. Daniel Craig goes down on Drew Starkey and vice versa, and early on he fucks a young Mexico City lad.

Barbera: “I don’t know if you are familiar with the book or not. It’s a short novel that was published only in 1985, right after the death of William Burroughs. It’s a very autobiographical novel when Burroughs was a drug addict and a gay man, and he was forced to leave Texas. He went to Mexico City, and he started to cruise in the bars and the restaurants trying to find company.

“The film is fantastic. I think it’s the best film by Luca Guadagnino so far, and the performance of Danny Craig is absolutely outstanding.” HE translation: I’ve seen a snippet or two from Queer and can tell you that Craig exudes a great deal of emotional vulnerability.

Barbera: “It’s not just I think it’s the performance of his life. He’s a great, great actor, and he takes some risks, of course, because it’s something that’s not in line with his previous films.” Imagine Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan getting down in the same fashion.

Queer‘s running time, by the way, is down to 135 minutes.

Barbera on Joker: Folie a Deux: “If you expect just a second part of [2019’s Joker], exactly the same kind of narrative and situation and so on, you are wrong, because the theme is much darker. It is much more inventive from every point of view. It’s completely unexpected. I think it is very bold, and brave, and creative, and an incredibly original film.”

Barbera on the collapse of the Toronto Film Festival (yippee!): “In 2012, most of the American films preferred to go to Toronto instead of coming to Venice, because Venice, of course, is more expensive. Toronto, it’s a lot cheaper and easier for them. In most cases, that was the option for the big studios. So it was not easy to convince all of them to come back to Venice. There were no studios’ films in Venice in 2012.

“The following year, we opened the festival with Gravity. That won the Oscar, and that was the beginning of a change in the relationship with the studios. After that, every year we had one or more than one films that went to the Oscars, then won the Oscars — like Birdman, Spotlight, La La Land, Shape of Water, Joker. So of course now it’s easy to get a film, because the studios and the Americans understood that they can use the platform of Venice to launch the film internationally, and to start a campaign for the Oscars, with all the press that we have in Venice.

“There is almost no press in Toronto, apart from the trades. We have something like 3,000 media representatives from all over the world, so they can really make a proper promotion with the film, the marketing of the film, starting from Venice.”