Sphaera: Edition #4

Sphaera

A realm to experience the lifeblood of all arts, across all disciplines, with the passion they deserve. Curated with a discerning independent spirit and a global lens. The pulse of creativity thrives here.

By Eric Kohn

By the time the Sundance Institute started generating national attention in the early 1990s, the non-profit institute had a few stalwarts. These included Michelle Satter, the universally-beloved guiding light of the Sundance Labs, who shepherded the early careers of so many filmmakers, and Tony Safford, the program director when Robert Redford’s organization first acquired the US Film Festival in 1985.

In recent decades two programmers emerged as pure products of the Sundance Film Festival, with industry clout forged in the early momentum of Park City buzz that catapulted them to leadership roles: John Cooper and Trevor Groth.

When longtime Sundance Film Festival chief Geoff Gilmore departed the festival in 2009, the amiable program director Cooper was elevated to the top spot, while Groth became his passionate, down-to-Earth deputy.

However, Cooper and Groth were among the core Sundance curators for years leading up to these appointments. Cooper knew little about the film world when he made the leap from the theater world to Sundance in 1989, while Groth was a recent college grad in Salt Lake City when he joined the festival as a volunteer four years later. Their tenures ended around roughly the same time: Groth left the festival for film investment firm 30West in 2018, while Cooper retired from his role a year later (he now runs the True West Film Center in Northern California and holds a programmer emeritus role with Sundance).

With Sundance moving to a new home in Boulder, Colorado in 2027, Cooper and Groth are preparing for their final Park City experiences in a new capacity: jury duty. The pair will select the winning film from the edgy NEXT section, which they co-created in 2010. No longer official spokespersons for Sundance’s current relevance or future prospects, the liberated duo got on the phone with SPHAERA to recall their history with the festival and how they view its potential next chapters from the sidelines.

The following interviews have been condensed and edited.

JOHN COOPER: At that time I joined in 1989, Sundance was a kind of grassroots arts organization. Everyone was working almost for free, just trying to build something. In 1990, I got asked to do the shorts program. It turns out I like to sit on my ass and watch movies. It was perfect. I watched 1,500 shorts that year and ended up with a program that included early work by Alexander Payne, Alison Maclean, Peter Hedges, and others. There were a lot of kids coming out of NYU and UCLA, as well as CalArts for animation stuff.

TREVOR GROTH: From attending the festival as a volunteer to working in the Utah office, then working at the labs and being hired to program the festival – and then doing that for 25 years – I mean, it couldn't be more personal for me. I joined as a volunteer in 1993 when I was still a student at the University of Utah, working in a videostore. I also worked at the Capital Theater, the performing arts theater in Salt Lake. At Sundance, I started in the development department selling ads for the catalogue. The notion of independent film was still being defined for that era. But I did recognize how cool it was.

JC: We saw so many copycats. A movie would come along like El Mariachi, Reservoir Dogs, or Clerks, and suddenly everyone was doing those kinds of films because they could find the money to make them. People could say, “Look! This film Sex, Lies, and Videotape was made for no money, played at Sundance, and here’s another one!” That was a big part of it though – the trajectory of which films were making it, which films America was ready for.

TG: In my first year as a programmer in 1994, I programmed Hoop Dreams. It was submitted on two VHS tapes. I didn't know back then, like, can we show a three-hour documentary? Is that OK? I remember talking to Geoff Gilmore about it and he was like, “If it works as a film, we can show it.” I was like, “Yeah, it definitely works as a film.” [Hoop Dreams became one of the most commercially successful documentaries of all time.]

We also showed Clerks that year. Having run a videostore, I could not believe that these guys made this movie that felt like it was for me and my friends and really spoke to me. I remember loving it, but wondering if anyone who didn’t work at a videostore would love it. Of course, it caught fire at the festival and we believed in Kevin Smith’s voice as a filmmaker.

It’s pretty remarkable the names that came through Sundance in those early years. It’s kind of a who’s who of working directors. Tarantino, Anderson, Russell, Haynes, Nolan, the list goes on and on.

JC: I always wished we could watch the films without any outside influence. You had to take calls from the agents who would call and say, “I have this film, it’s so amazing.” You’d watch it, and say, “Oh, it’s not that good,” and they’d get so upset. I think the trick with Sundance was that when we said no to things, and they’d get pissed off – but they never thought we were favoring someone else. We were doing that for everyone. A lot of times they would come back next year and say, “You were right, that wasn’t a good film.” We’d watch things seriously. You just considered these films that way. Nobody could just get a film in. That’s our job. You want us to do that.

TG: A lot of filmmakers launched out of Sundance then wanted to go to Cannes. We understood that, but also resisted it. Obviously Pi was an important film for me that I discovered and championed. Then Darren Aronofsky took his second feature, Requiem for a Dream, to Cannes. I got it, that made sense for the film, and I was lucky enough to be able to walk the red carpet there with him.

JC: We would show films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut Hard Eight – a perfectly good film, not brilliant – but when he does Boogie Nights, we don’t get to show that. [The film premiered on the fall festival circuit.] We had to realize we were putting people into the market. People wanted to go to Cannes, to go to Venice, to be on a bigger stage. Then they’d come back. Call Me By Your Name was an example of that because Luca Guadagnino knew America was a better place to start off that film. He played it well because it got accepted by Americans before Europeans could tear it apart for homophobic reasons.

TG: SXSW was a festival that came on the scene and made a splash. They started doing really cool programming and I loved it. We did have some positioning for films with them and part of the NEXT section that Cooper and I created when we took over was a response to that. We recognized that there were some American independent films we were not finding space for in the festival and wanted to include them. I think SXSW was probably frustrated by that.

JC: When Trevor and I took over, the festival wasn’t balanced right. There was this whole American Spectrum section that was just mediocre movies of a certain kind. A lot of them were fine, but we weren’t representing a younger point of view for the weird filmmakers beyond our Midnight section. That’s when I thought we had to even this out because we only had so many spaces.

TG: We tried to remain as pure as possible in the way that we selected the films. High expectations for a film is the worst thing that could ever happen to it. That’s where my frustration came from. The lead-up into a festival where certain films became the hot ticket, and the one that everyone was talking about was going to be the breakout – almost always, those films almost always suffered from the weight of that expectation. Cooper and I started downplaying the program and not singling out films as real breakouts. We tried to level it out and let people come in to experience the films.

JC: I never lost my emotional machinery around looking at a film. I was never an academic. It was always about whether this film worked. I don’t care how important it is or if they’re doing something interesting. Thank god for my staff, who kept me a little grounded. I wasn’t even listening to their words all the time. I heard their passion and that’s when the light went off. When all the kids were watching and loving Napoleon Dynamite, I realized it would be something.

TG: It’s harder for programmers now to show films that provoke audiences in a certain way. I remember showing Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. That’s a heavy movie, with a violent scene that is really triggering for people. At that time, there were audience members who took issue with it. I talked to them and I felt like I had a way to defend the decision. Now? I don’t think programmers would show Irreversible.

JC: Well, I’d already shown Gaspar’s short film already so I knew he was a little weirdo.

TG: I loved The Comedy and I’m proud of having programmed it. I saw Tim Heidecker the other night and he still remembers some rough screenings of that film at Sundance. For me, that’s OK, I loved having the freedom to play some films like that. There was space for that.

JC: Robert Redford was heavily involved for many years and quite a pain sometimes, but he made you better at your job. There were some years where he was directing or starring in a movie when he wasn’t there as much. But we were always reporting to him and he was always weighing in on big picture decisions for the festival. Throughout, he was keeping us on track to make sure we were following through on the mission of Sundance and why he created it. He didn’t want people kissing his ass.

TG: I’m pretty good at living in denial. It hasn’t sunk in yet that he’s not around to lead Sundance into the future, but I do believe what he’s created is so strong and vital that there are a lot of people able to carry that torch.

JC: Boards don’t like taking chances. That’s the one thing that changed at Sundance when Redford wasn’t involved. He was always up for the idea. I probably gave him too many ideas half the time and some of them failed. At one point, I was working on a year-round venue in Park City. I loved that project. Maybe I got too caught up in it. But it was going to make Park City more formidable for us, something we could really use.

I’ve never been a company guy. I decided very shortly into my time at Sundance that I’d never do another kind of job in the industry. People would call me when they were starting independent wings at the studios. I said, “You won’t give me the freedom I have here,” and I just didn’t have the patience for that. I didn’t have that ability to maneuver carefully through that kind of world.

COVID happened like five minutes after I left. I felt like the luckiest man alive. Oy. Things were exploding everywhere. If I hadn’t announced my retirement when it hit, I never could have left because it would’ve looked like chickenshit, like I was abandoning ship or something.

TG: My years at Sundance were from 1993 to 2018. Even though there were obviously ups and downs in the market, there was also stability in it. The opportunities that existed in the film distribution landscape were pretty steady even with some fluctuation. Once the pandemic happened, a lot of things broke down, starting with people’s moviegoing habits. It’s habitual. People were forced not to go to the theaters and recognized they were happy enough at home streaming movies. Then the festival didn’t happen in person for two years and that was brutal. I am happy that I didn’t have to try to navigate those tricky waters trying to put on a festival through a pandemic.

The movie industry was pretty steady for about 100 years and now it feels like it’s going through a radical transformation. There are a lot of unknowns as it relates to Sundance, financing, and the traditional studio landscape. All we can do is continue to believe that people have loved storytelling from the early days of cavemen sitting around a fire through novels and plays and into the modern era of movies. There’s always that desire for it. The methods of connecting with people through it will shift a lot now, but I think Sundance can continue to play an important role in providing a platform for the most interesting storytellers to connect with those audiences. Storytelling will find a way.

JC: You see it more on television now. Some of the best independent film work I’ve seen lately is on television. It has that same energy because they broke up all the censorship that TV used to have.

Look, it’s not even just about Redford. It’s about this idea and spirit that everybody buys into that could happen anywhere. For a while, I was pushing for Sundance to move to Detroit. It doesn’t matter. We’re all just standing in a bar anyway. I don’t know Boulder at all. I’m hoping they made the right choice. They seem like they took a long time and were really thoughtful about it. They needed venues, less expensive houses for filmmakers. I hope a lot of those problems get solved.

TC: Sundance told me some of their plans. It sounds awesome, they’ve got full support of the people who live there, great venues, it’s a walkable setting. All these things could absolutely work. But then the question is, does the alchemy exist there to carry on the power of Sundance? There is an unknown in it. We’ll see.