Allan King is one of Canada’s most highly respected filmmakers, with numerous award-winning documentaries and feature films to his credit including Warrendale, One Night Stand, Silence of the North and Dying at Grace.

This is the first in an ongoing series of articles from Canadian directors that will be published in Playback in partnership with the Directors Guild of Canada.

After almost half a century of taking films to festivals (or sending them unaccompanied – a crime akin to child neglect), I may just have got the hang of it. The Directors Guild and Playback thought so and asked me to pass on notes for those of my colleagues either just beginning, or who have yet to master the necessary aplomb (if that’s possible) or learned how to feign it. Personally, the latter is the best I can manage.

I’ve always envied the confident, even roguish grin which David Cronenberg flashes at the camera as he walks up the stairs to a Cannes Film Festival screening, or the immensely confident charm which Denys Arcand exudes before an Academy audience – in Canada or L.A. And Robert Lantos is the master of us all.

Most filmmakers I’ve known (myself included) are intense narcissists with huge but dangerously fragile egos – vulnerable to, even defenseless against, anxiety. Anxiety not only robs one of skill, powerlessness quickly turns to panic, panic to rage and rage, unexpressed, leads to depression. And, while depression is the source of all creativity, it’s not of much use at a festival.

My first venture was Skidrow – a film about alcoholic derelicts in Vancouver and a favorite of John Greirson’s. It was invited to an early Edinburgh Festival and won an Honourable Mention. The CBC at that time entered only First Aid and other kinds of public service awards, so I didn’t get to go to Edinburgh. I didn’t even know it had been entered and so was doubly thrilled with the award – doubly because there was no fee of pre-festival anxiety to pay.

It also taught me a lesson: in the best of all possible worlds (as Pangloss would say) find out if you have won an award in advance of the presentations. Then you don’t have to sit squirming in agony, feigning blithe good cheer in full view of a sadistic audience. It’s a stroke of good luck I’ve managed twice.

Once, in the early days of the Canadian Film Awards, One Night Stand, written by Carol Bolt and starring Chapelle Jaffe and Brent Carver, won five awards. I watched the show on TV and zipped down to the theater (15 minutes away) to enjoy the producer/director accolades. In the case of another awards night, I was out in the country with my children and got a call from awards director Sandra Gathercole, asking, urging and then virtually begging me to come down to Niagara for the ceremony. I got the light and was present – for the first time with aplomb – as Margaret Lawrence’s A Bird in the House, adapted by Patricia Watson, scooped up four or five more awards.

But almost invariably you have to sweat it out.

It’s the rage that’s hardest to manage. I remember chewing out Claude Jutra when he interviewed me for the CBC at the Montreal Festival in 1960 or ’61, where I was showing Rickshaw, which I’d made in Calcutta and which had won prizes in Leipzig and Vancouver. Now, anyone who could be irritated by the immensely talented and equally gentle Claude Jutra has to be off his rocker and I was. He referred to me as a member of ‘the West Coast film school’ – along with Gene Lawrence and Ron Kelly. I was insulted. Gene and Ron and I differed and fought fiercely about how to make films. I hadn’t realized that it was compliment to be thought of as a ‘school’ making an innovative kind of documentary. It was the first body of work in Canada that hadn’t come from the National Film Board.

I was equally edgy at festivals in San Francisco and Mannheim.

But the worst was going to Cannes with Warrendale. It had been invited through the good offices of Guy Cote at the NFB and Louis Marcorelles, editor of Cahiers du Cinema. I contacted my distributor, the inimitable Derek Hill of Short Film Service in London, and asked if he could get us some publicity while he was in Cannes. I sent him $100 for expenses – urging him to spend it carefully!

Cannes was the first time I’d experienced the insouciant indifference with which press and critics bounce in and out of screenings – I was shocked and furious. Later in the corridors, I was pursued by a shy French gentleman who wanted to give me some kind of certificate. I tried to brush him off and can’t remember whether I finally took it and stuffed in a suitcase or he posted it to me later. I was only interested in a real award or prize.

And sure enough, the day I was to leave, Louis came up and said we’d won a prize. I didn’t catch just which it was, but I was thrilled and rushed over to tell a Toronto journalist friend who cabled a story to the Toronto Star. It broke the news that Warrendale was a ‘Cannes Prize Winner.’ Gosh that looked good in the ads!

As a result, Warrendale, which came close to never getting screened widely anywhere, had a 13-week run at the best art house in Toronto and I had the thrill of seeing audiences lined up in the rain waiting to get tickets. Then Lennie Bernstein at Columbia booked it into theaters across the country.

It was only many years later that I played back in memory the events at Cannes and realized that the man trying to get me to accept that certificate was giving me a Priz d’arte et d’essai, that it was probably from a French association of homes for disturbed children and likely organized by Louis. His family was prominent in childcare in France. But, you know, I have never really pressed an enquiry.

Festivals are about getting your work known and they are great for papering your office walls. In London, 1960, I visited Richard Williams, the brilliant animator – Roger Rabbit, and all. His lobby was lined with awards. I asked my friend, Derek Hill, ‘How do you get some of those?’ He said, ‘Allan, there is a festival every day of the year. Send your film and you get a certificate. You can get enough to paper a building.’

Nowadays there are two or three festivals for every day – so you can get all the paper you want. On bad days, they make you feel good. And as a filmmaker one needs all the good feeling one can get. It’s the scariest job in the world.