At Sundance Lab, Movie Economics Can’t Be Ignored This Year

The storied Sundance Directors Lab has helped develop the early films of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler and Ava DuVernay. But when this year’s cohort of filmmakers arrived for the intensive workshop, the setting could easily have felt ominous. For the first time, the lab was taking place not at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah but in Colorado, at the Stanley Hotel, known more as the inspiration for “The Shining” than for fostering little movies that could.

Contrary to the inn that gnawed at Jack Torrance’s sanity, the hotel in Estes Park is actually a thriving operation and as good a place as any to collaborate and create in peace. Yet the behemoth in the Rockies — with its seances, ghost sightings and, yes, a hedge maze — can’t help but seem like a symbol for an especially chilling moment for Sundance and the movie industry at large.

FOR MORE THAN FOUR DECADES, the Sundance Film Festival has been a beacon to hungry filmmakers with stories that often proved there were moviegoers beyond those Hollywood courted. The festival remains the bright object that the Sundance Institute presents to the world. But it is the organization’s founder, Robert Redford, and the artist-support programs to which he is committed — for Indigenous filmmakers, for financiers, for producers and others — that have quietly, steadfastly nurtured the young talents so many associate with the festival’s breakout films.

Of all the programs, the flagship Directors Lab embodies the Sundance Institute’s long game. Since 1981, a carefully chosen cohort of filmmakers and an equally curated group of veteran advisers, along with small crews and actors, have regularly convened to shoot scenes from the up-and-coming artists’ screenplays.