Interview: Rich Raddon

Rich Raddon, who has been at the helm of the Los Angeles Film Festival for nearly a decade, is eager to continue to see the festival grow into an event that is as eclectic as L .A . itself. He and his staff have worked hard at building it into a world class event, screening a range of movies from small independent films to foreign dramas to big budget studio movies like this year’s action thriller, Wanted. As he envisions it, the Festival will continue to grow as a community event that brings together movie lovers from all walks of life.

What is your background?

I’m from Chicago and my first job was as an assistant to director John Hughes. We had just finished shooting Home Alone 2 and we were prepping for Dennis the Menace. It was a great experience in the late 1980s, early 90s. At the same time, I was noticing that at the art houses in Chicago they were playing interesting, smaller films like Slacker. I was totally taken aback by it. I was curious as to what it was all about. I had gone to school in Utah and so I called to see if there was somebody there I knew. An old friend was there working at the Sundance Film Festival and he asked me if I would like to run prints all over the theaters in town. I had nothing except that three-week job. The Festival really engaged me. From there I produced a mockumentary, And God Spoke. With that I moved up to LA and lived cheaply for about 10 years of my life producing independent fi lms. The last fi lm I produced was a four million dollar fi lm starring Guy Pearce and Lilly Taylor. It screened at the LA Independent Film Festival and the director needed a successor to take over. I agreed to do it for two years. I’ve stayed on another seven.

What was the objective of the film festival?

When I first came on the objective was to just keep it going. It was a good platform for independent film in Hollywood. But then Independent Feature Project got involved to give it the backbone of a strong organization behind it. Then we realized that we wanted the film festival to be more. We wanted to create a world class film festival in LA. In order to do that, we can’t just show independent films. We have to show Hollywood movies, international films, increase our dates and venues. For three years we went through a tremendous amount of growing pains. We wanted to build something that doesn’t exist in the film festival arena. We also wanted to make something very specific to L.A. by creating an event that is completely open and accessible to the general public and has live music, a sense of place. We moved it to Westwood because we wanted people to hang out for the day, go from one theater to the next, go to a restaurant. Also, so many industry screenings happen in the Fall at the Arclight and at The Grove, that we wanted to differentiate ourselves. Your biggest challenge has been getting the message out that the Los Angeles Film Festival is not just for independent film, right?

It has not been a challenge with the general public. But in the industry, yes, that has been the biggest challenge. At Film Independent we engage as mentors and with programs that help up-and-coming filmmakers. But we want to engage the industry in a more concrete way at the LA Film Festival. We want to show all kinds of films. That is why we are opening with Wanted, a huge Angelina Jolie film, and we are closing with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, another Universal Pictures film. But both Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) and Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy) are directors we have supported in the past when they were making films in their home countries with smaller budgets. We are excited to continue to support them. It wouldn’t make sense not to support them now that they are making movies with big budgets at major studios. We are also screening Journey to the Center of the Earth because it’s a great family film and we have a Family Day at the Festival. We also have international films with directors that have not yet been discovered. And in our competition we have American independent films. I want to leave the future open for us. We don’t want to be limited by the movies that we screen.

How many people attended last year?

We had 83,000 people attend last year. We hope to have 100,000 this year. We are the largest fi lm event in Southern California. Last year, we screened 165 films.