Quentin Tarantino

Few movies have made such a seismic impact on the world as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The picture’s premiere at Sundance might well be the most important of modern cinema. The stylistically scything heist movie would launch the career of Tarantino and shape filmmaking as we know it. Much to Tarantino’s chagrin, his movie didn’t actually win any of the big prizes at the festival, and also wasn’t bought by a distributor. This is why he once groused, “I got fuck all” at Sundance, and admitted, “It hurt my feelings.”

Here’s the thing, though: to say Tarantino got nothing from Reservoir Dogs being platformed at Sundance is not entirely accurate. The feverish buzz generated by the screening hit the mainstream press, and by the time Tarantino took the movie to Cannes (the world’s other most esteemed film festival) and met with The Weinstein Company, the film’s infamous reputation undoubtedly helped convince that indie studio to make a deal.

However, Redford and Sundance were even more integral to Tarantino’s career than he might care to admit. After all, in 1991, he was chosen to be part of one of the Sundance Institute’s filmmaking labs, in which he was afforded the opportunity to workshop scenes from Reservoir Dogs under the tutelage of working directors like Terry Gilliam. In that lab, Tarantino was given a crash course in how to actually turn his screenplay into a feature film, and without that advice from an industry professional, who knows if his debut film would have turned out half as iconic.

Chloé Zhao

Nine years before she won ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards for Nomadland, Chloé Zhao was shepherded through the process of making her debut film Songs My Brothers Taught Me by the Sundance Institute. Beginning in 2012, Zhao was accepted into screenwriting, directing, and production workshops, and was also able to avail of the fellowships and grants that accompanied the labs. She was grateful for Redford’s creation “supporting me throughout the whole process”, and when she’d finished shooting the film, she even returned for a music and sound lab to apply the finishing touches.

To illustrate how difficult it is to get an independent feature to the screen, though, even with all this help, it was still touch-and-go at times as to whether Zhao would be able to finish the movie. A whole mess of issues attempted to crash her movie as her funding fell through and her filmmaking kit was stolen from her home.

A run of issues can usually have two effects: either it sidetracks the production and sends it on a downward spiral to never be completed, or it gives you the punch and desire you need to make it happen. For Zhao, it was the latter and she brought the cast to the premiere with glee: “Seeing them, standing on the stage of Eccles Theatre, it was really just an incredible feeling, and seeing such a big audience,” she remembered with a smile. “Yeah, that was a pretty incredible experience. I taught the kids to ski,” she grinned. “They went snowboarding for the first time. That was pretty good.”

Paul Thomas Anderson

$20,000 won’t get you much in Hollywood, but at Sundance it will get you a start in life. Paul Thomas Anderson grabbed his chance when he made the short film Cigarettes & Coffee starring Philip Baker Hall, whom he met by chance. Hall was so bowled over by Anderson’s short script, in fact, that he compared the 20-something aspiring filmmaker to the Bard himself. “I was wondering, who was the first actor in the 17th century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was reading?” Hall once mused. “I certainly knew what I had in my hand.”

Ultimately, Hall wasn’t the only person to believe Anderson had something special. After the short screened, the higher-ups at Sundance were so impressed that they invited the filmmaker to the 1994 Director’s Lab to expand the short into a feature. At that extensive workshop, Anderson – like Tarantino a few years before him – workshopped his script, entitled Sydney, the name of Baker Hall’s character, and absorbed all he could possibly learn about the filmmaking process.

Sydney expanded the story of Cigarettes & Coffee by shifting the focus to Hall’s ageing gambler, who does everything in his power to conceal his dark past from two close friends he’s come to think of as his children. When it premiered at Cannes in 1996 under the new title Hard Eight, it launched his career as one of the best filmmakers of his generation. A new directing heavyweight had emerged.

Ryan Coogler

Sometimes all you need is a conversation to make things happen, and Ryan Coogler got that when he met with the Sundance Institute to talk about his movie Fruitvale Station. Inspired by the tragic death of a civilian at the hands of the Bay Area Rapid Transit police, Coogler felt determined to share the story and convinced those in power at Sundance to let him enrol in an upcoming writing lab.

Over the next year, Coogler’s project went through numerous rewrites, based on what he learned from his advisors at the lab, and Sundance proceeded to funnel funding his way at critical points during the movie’s production. By the time it premiered on January 19th, 2013, at the Festival, Coogler’s debut was a Sundance picture through and through. To his delight, it won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, and Coogler’s career has gone from strength to strength since.

It’s hard to say whether the filmmaker would have been able to deliver such a growing ream of movies without this endorsement, but Coogler himself spoke glowingly about his experience with Sundance: “It’s a part of me. So much of it impacted me and made me the filmmaker that I am today.”

Steven Soderbergh

Prising apart the legacies of Steven Soderbergh and Sundance is nearly impossible. So ingrained in the creation of his movie Sex, Lies and Videotape, it feels that half the credit for the movie should go to Redford’s establishment, while the success of the picture would equally launch the festival.

After Sex, Lies, and Videotape hit Hollywood like a tsunami, though, the boom of ’90s independent cinema was born. It signalled to the world that Sundance was the new moviemaking Mekkah for the upcoming group of filmmakers called Indiewood. Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky and Spike Jonze are just a few of those directors who saw the potential of the new festival and headed straight for it.

“The energy shifted,” Soderbergh recalled of this incredible time. “I had this parakeet’s near-eyed view on how everything changed overnight.” Indeed, according to the Erin Brockovich filmmaker, before his movie screened at Sundance, the market for American independent films was tough, to say the least. “When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience was like trying to hit a thrown baseball,” he once ruefully joked. However, after Redford’s platform put him on the map, he became one of the most acclaimed – and hardest working – directors in the game.