Sundance’s Director of Festival Programming tells us what to expect at this year’s fest.

BY HOLLY WILLIS

John Cooper joined the Sundance festival staff 17 years ago and is now the Director of Festival Programming, working closely alongside Festival Director Geoff Gilmore. Cooper, who was a playwright before joining the festival, has had a hand in several key aspects of Sundance, spearheading a more intensive focus on short films when he started in the early ’90s, for example, and championing gay filmmakers throughout his tenure. Cooper currently oversees the festival programming staff. “More and more I’m learning how to let go and ask ‘Is there an audience for this?’ and trust that the team I’ve put together will push for the things they feel most passionate about,” he says of his leadership role.

Cooper recently added Director of Creative Development for the Sundance Institute to his résumé, expanding his duties to include event programming throughout the year. He will help organize the festival’s screening series at BAM in the spring, and will work on enhancing the institute’s online presence while also helping build the New Frontier section “as a thread of work on the edge and asking how this work can inform classical storytelling.”

Funny, self-deprecating and entirely approachable, Cooper is known to thousands of American filmmakers as the guy who calls with really excellent news. For the festival, he’s integral, the armature that supports everything. We talked to Cooper in December, as preparations for the 2007 edition of the festival were in high gear.

What are some of the key trends in this year’s festival? One of the things that I’ve seen in the independent film world — and maybe it’s because it’s something I’m predisposed to — is a lot of films about optimism, and also films about overcoming obstacles. There’s still the kind of struggle that we’ve seen in the past, but the emphasis on overcoming something is more apparent. James C. Strouse’s Grace Is Gone, which stars John Cusack as a man whose wife is killed in Iraq, is not an angry, anti-military film. Instead it’s about overcoming grief. There’s also a group of movies that Geoff [Gilmore] calls “coming-of-middle-age movies” that feature really interesting characters who are older than many of the characters that we’ve seen here in the past. Starting Out in the Evening stars Frank Langella, for example, and then there’s Life Support, our closing-night film, starring Queen Latifah as a woman who overcomes her crack addiction. I also think that filmmakers are looking beyond America. Maybe for younger filmmakers it takes a war to remind us of the outside world, so I’m wondering if this is the year that we’ll really feel the post-9/11 impact. Independent film takes you into places that sometimes nothing else can.

What was behind the decision to open the festival with Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10? We knew we wanted something different, and this is a film that’s about youth, and it’s a film about theatricality. We also like its style. Brett uses great animation and great music, and I think the film as a whole has a lot of the components that make up independent film. It hits a lot of those marks, and that’s something that we look for in an opening-night film.

Critics claim that Sundance has changed its agenda over the years, succumbing to Hollywood. What do you make of that? I guess the question really is, Have we become what we set out to [be]? For me the answer is yes, even though many people think we’re supposed to be embarrassed by that. The world wants us to be something else. But we set out to get power for our filmmakers and to get power for the industry, and we do that now. We are a place that the industry has to consider.

But what about the festival’s overt gestures toward making the industry more comfortable while the general public often finds it nearly impossible to even see a film at the festival? We started the industry office not because [Cinetic head] John Sloss or [Sony Pictures Classics’] Tom Bernard wanted us to; we started it to inform filmmakers and get them better connected. And we’ve been working on the madness at the door — for a few years this kind of frenzy served the filmmaker. I mean, first there was nothing; nobody lined up for screenings. Then there was too much — and it wasn’t pretty. We wanted excitement but not the brawl-at-the-wedding excitement. So the question for a while was, How do we control that stuff? What do we build? So new screening spaces are helping. We’ve grown very fast....

The International Competition program is in its third year. Any thoughts on its success or impact? I think that we’re hitting our stride with the program now in the sense that we’re figuring out why we’re doing this. I think there’s an American audience for these films, so part of our goal is working on that. But I also think it’s about bringing American and international directors together, and creating a space for these people to interact.

What do you think people looking back at the festival when it’s over will say? I think this is the Everyone but Patty Clarkson Year! We have all of these amazing actresses from independent film returning in a bunch of films — from Julie Christie to Parker Posey, Queen Latifah to Hope Davis. It’s almost every actress known to independent film. My dream would be to have a dinner with all of these actresses. I don’t even need to talk to them; I just want to sit among them all. If only we had a sponsor.... But seriously, right now I’m focused on what’s happening in January. We’ve done two filmmaker orientations so far, and all the filmmakers are fresh, a new class that we’re going to share our lives with. They have this kooky optimism, and it’s great. How they do it I will never know — and I don’t think I want to know. It’s magical....