TIFF at 50: Jason Reitman on Toronto family ties, bidding wars, and celebratory cigars

Jason Reitman’s ties to Toronto and its film festival run deep. “My family were Holocaust survivors who escaped communist Czechoslovakia under the floorboards of a boat, wound up in Vienna, then France, and got to Canada,” recalls Reitman, son of the late Ghostbusters director Ivan and a successful filmmaker in his own right.

“My grandfather had a dry cleaner’s on Avenue Road, just up from the [old] Four Seasons, and eventually managed a car wash at King & John. My father was four years old, [he] embraces becoming a Canadian, goes to college on a music scholarship, becomes a filmmaker, becomes a successful filmmaker, buys the car wash and gives it to my grandfather.”

Eventually the Reitman family tore down the car wash, turning it into a parking lot. It remained that way for the next two decades, until a 50-storey skyscraper was built on land donated by the Reitmans, with the first five floors becoming home to Toronto International Film Festival. “So, the offices where the programmers work, the five theatres, the Lightbox, sit on the land of my grandfather’s car wash,” says Reitman proudly. “There’s a plaque at Reitman Square on the theatre that tells my grandparents’ story. I feel this very deep connection with that film festival because it’s part of my family history, even architecturally.”

Reitman’s initial experience of TIFF as a filmmaker was in 2000 when his first short In God We Trust opened for Andrew Dominik’s Chopper. Prior to that, his Toronto trips were “reserved for Passover, barmitzvahs and batmitzvahs as a kid. I have a lot of Canadian family.”

Five years later, he was back with his debut feature Thank You For Smoking, an indie that sparked a bidding war. “I don’t know if this is going to be the first and last time it’s ever seen,” he reflects. “I had read enough stories about films being bought at the festival and heard about these late-night bidding wars, and you wonder if people are going to want your film and you’ll be up all night entertaining offers, or if you are going to be up all night drinking whiskey alone.”

Bidding war

Thank You For Smoking premiered at the Ryerson Theatre. “My hands were sweating through the entire film. We got a lot of laughs and when it ended there was immediate interest and people started making offers,” recalls Reitman. “Cassian Elwes, our sales agent, was negotiating the sale and, at the end of the day, the two who wanted it most were Paramount Classics and Fox Searchlight.”

The bidding went late and was won by Searchlight. “I remember we went to [restaurant] Sassafraz, on Cumberland, my agent and Cassian,” says Reitman. “We were smoking cigars at four in the morning because our film had sold to the company that had released Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite, and it felt like we were in amazing hands.”

But the following day both Para­mount and Searchlight claimed to have won. “For a week in the press, they each claimed to have bought the film, and got really pissed off at each other. And we were pissed at our sales agent. It could not have been better press because you had two studios fighting about who owned it. So that was an amazing week.”

Two years later, things got even better. Reitman was back at TIFF with his next feature Juno. “That’s one of the great nights of my life,” he says. “That’s one of the greatest screenings I’ve ever had, back in the Ryerson Theatre. The movie ended and the crowd burst into applause and leapt to its feet. I lifted Elliot Page up in the air, and when I looked down next to me, [legendary US critic] Roger Ebert was sitting across the aisle. He had just lost his voice.” [Ebert had recently had part of his lower jaw removed in his treatment for thyroid cancer.] “He could no longer speak, and he lifted his thumbs both up in the air at me.”

The following day, Reitman got a call saying that Ebert wanted to interview him. “He had new technology that allowed him to write questions into his computer, and it would voice them in his voice,” he says. “It was the first time he ever did an interview that way.”

The two met at the Four Seasons on Avenue Road. “He clearly liked the film,” says Reitman, “but what was so moving was being with him as he was navigating this new technology to still talk. This is a guy who made a living because of his voice. He was so quick-witted and so smart, and knew film inside and out. I watched him trying to hold a conversation using a computer, something that nowadays would be a lot easier. That was my greatest Toronto experience ever, that night seeing Roger, and the next day doing the interview with him — it was beautiful.”

Since then, Reitman has brought “at least six of the films I’ve directed” to TIFF, most recently Saturday Night in 2024. “A few more I’ve produced, a television show. I’ve come back with everything under the sun.”

Spiritual home

When in Toronto, Reitman tends to visit his aunts and uncles for matzo ball soup but recommends Dynasty Chinese Cuisine on Yorkville and a hot dog stand on King & John. But it is the Four Seasons, which moved from its Avenue Road location in 2012 to its current spot on Yorkville Avenue, that remains something of a spiritual home.

“It used to be the unofficial headquarters of the festival. You knew everything that was happening in town by the conversations in the lobby, the restaurant and hanging out in the hallways on the second floor,” says Reitman. “I remember staying at that hotel with my short film, with no sense of the trajectory of what my life was going to be, thinking, ‘It would be great one day if I could make a living as a director.’ I was staying there when Thank You For Smoking was bought. And I was in that hotel with Roger Ebert when he was identifying Juno as a life-changing movie. My life went through a full arc in that hotel.”

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