Don’t Ask Me What I Think

In May of 1989, my cousin Scott and I brought our newly finished film The Gifted to the Cannes Film Festival.

Not to the festival proper. To the market, which is where films without an official selection go to find a buyer. The film’s completion financing came from Paul Klein, who had run programming at NBC in the late seventies and who invented the theory that audiences do not choose the show they love, they choose the one they object to least.

Two things happened that afternoon, about ten minutes apart. I have been thinking about both of them for thirty-seven years.

Walking toward our screening, we passed Spike Lee. He had Do the Right Thing in competition that year. One of us asked how it was going. He said, "We wuz robbed."

Scott and I were New Yorkers. So was he. In the middle of the most carefully managed ten days in the film business, on a street in the south of France, we got a New York answer. Three words, no cushioning, handed to two strangers who had asked a polite question.

I never found out what he meant. The Palme d’Or that year went to sex, lies, and videotape, and if that is what he was talking about, then for the record I agree with him. But I only have the three words.

Then we got to the screening room, and there, sitting in one of the first few rows, was Roger Ebert.

I went over and thanked him for coming. In reply, he promised me two things. First: no matter what, he would watch the entire film. Second: I should not ask him what he thought.

He stayed. I didn’t ask.

The first promise is attention. A critic at a market screening is entitled to give a small film twenty minutes and slip out the back, and a great deal of that business runs on exactly that. He was telling me in advance that he would not do it.

The second promise is the harder one. He would not hand me a verdict on demand. He understood precisely what the moment was. I was the producer, standing in front of him hoping, and anything he said in that doorway would have been either a kindness that was not true or a judgment I had not really invited.

Cannes is ten days of people performing their answers. That afternoon I ran into two men who would not do it. One said the ungracious thing because he believed it. The other refused to say the gracious thing for the same reason.

I do different work now. People come to me because a search result or an AI answer has rendered a verdict about them, and the verdict is wrong, or years out of date, or every word of it true and wildly out of proportion to an entire life. They want to know what I think.

I tell them. That is the one part of Ebert’s example I did not keep. But I try to keep the rest. Watch the whole thing before deciding anything. Do not hand someone a comfortable answer because they are standing in front of you hoping for one. And when the record is wrong, say so plainly, the way a man from Brooklyn said it on a sidewalk in Cannes to two strangers who asked how things were going.