How has the Tribeca Film Festival affected the New York Film Festival?
I wouldn’t say it has affected us that much. The proliferation of festivals has certainly robbed the sense of the uniqueness of the festival. Once upon a time, when people spoke of “The Festival,” that pretty much meant us. Now there’s literally more than one festival every week. As far as Tribeca goes, I think people recognize that it’s a very different kind of event. They do very different things than we do. So it hasn’t affected us in terms of the films that we get, or in terms of taking away a part of our potential audience, or anything like that. If anything, it’s made our personality and our character clearer to people, because they now have something close at hand with which to compare us. Have there been any particular films you’ve programmed over the past twenty years that you feel especially vindicated about? I was very pleased that in 1988 when we showed Mike Leigh’s High Hopes. Leigh had principally been a British TV director, and some people had a little bit of knowledge o
