Belly Fest

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

Scarlett Johansson touched my belly. Naomi Watts looked like she wanted to, and Benicio Del Toro glanced at it sideways and said, “Kids rock. Good for you.” At least I think he did, but he’s a career mumbler.

Of the many Toronto International Film Festivals I covered for a national newspaper between 1999 and 2004, the 2003 TIFF was the weirdest. For daily print journalists, the festival is an obstacle course of screenings, followed by minutes in hotel rooms with celebrities and filmmakers, followed by the agony of tape transcription, followed by hazy writing, followed by sleep. For 10 days. Many people who work the festival get very sick; Cold FX and antibacterial hand soap move around like business cards.

To add to those inherent delights, in 2003 I was six months pregnant. Even though the belly made me nauseous and mentally kaleidoscopic, I highly recommend it as the most fabulous accessory an entertainment writer can sport: an enormous pregnant stomach is the ultimate icebreaker.

Interviewing celebrities can be hard; not coal-mining/waitressing/lumber-jacking hard, but hard. Celebrities are as guarded as the Hope Diamond, and they have every right to be, thanks to Bonnie Fuller. While the festival is exhausting for the press, it must be its own private Hades for the famous. After being poked and prodded for days in their little hotel cages, tossed the same questions over and over, some can barely muster a smile when confronted with the next journalist. Who can blame them, really? The interviewer-subject relationship is fraught, a form of covert exploitation that celebrities, more than anyone else, must recognize for its sleazy self. As Janet Malcolm wrote in The Journalist and the Murderer, the journalist  “is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” So why does a star consent to participate at all? Because unless he has been granted Johnny-Depp-Arty-Isolationist status, he has something to sell (himself, his movie), and so does the journalist (herself, her website).

Some, like Naomi Watts, are worse than others at hiding their disdain for the process. When the publicist shut the door behind me, I had to scan the room twice to find her. She was like Alice after taking the tiny potion, a frail finger-puppet version of the actress sitting on a chair with her feet barely touching the ground. She looked at me warily, offered a tiny, “Hello,” that sounded like, “Don’t hurt me.” I set out my tape recorder, complimented her on her brilliant performance in 21 Grams, to which she whispered a thank you and proceeded to stare at her little ankles. Then, suddenly, her head whipped up. “You’re pregnant!” She grew about a foot, and asked me a series of questions. “You’re so thin,” she said. “It looks like a basketball under your shirt. Do you exercise?” To which I thought, “I’m thin? Honey, have you eaten in this millennium?” But we were off, and she kicked back easily while I plied her soul.

There is something inhuman about a conversation where the players know that what’s really at stake is a commercial transaction. But of course, even people who are shilling are people, and at the festival, they are also artists of some kind. And what people and artists want more than anything is to actually connect, and to share their perspective, even with a journalist. A big, pregnant belly signifies many things — sex, luck, impending sacrifice — but mostly it suggests optimism: pregnancy is the ultimate creative act, and maybe actors respond to that.

Director Sofia Coppola visited the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. (Photo Carlo Allegri/Getty Images)

When I entered the suite of director Sofia Coppola, she was on the phone with her back to me (“Hi Daddy… Yeah, Roman’s flying in tonight… It’s a restaurant called Prego…”). The interviews were running late, and while she always has that inflection-free, California-bored delivery, she sounded unusually drained. When Coppola finally turned to face me, she saw my bicycle helmet and said, “Is that safe when you’re pregnant?” We talked about pregnant cycling and my due date, and that segued nicely into a conversation about young marriage, which was relevant to her film Lost in Translation, and also to her life with then-husband Spike Jonze. She admitted that marriage was tough, and I wondered if she would have opened up if I hadn’t been pregnant. Would Jane Campion have talked about her own child’s heartbreaking stillbirth and her feelings on motherhood? Would Scarlett Johansson have touched me without permission, years before Isaac Mizrahi did the same to her?

When I entered Johansson’s suite, she was literally having a pillow fight (fully clothed — sorry) with her assistant and behaving as if she had washed down a pound of sugar with a dozen Red Bulls. The furniture had been cleared so photographers could get better pictures, and the young actress appeared to leap between walls. I was wondering how I was going to get her down long enough to fill my eight minutes with scintillating questions about Lost in Translation when she spied me from mid-air and squealed, “Oh my God! You’re pregnant! It’s so CUTE!” Because she was 18 and Scarlett Johansson — and because I think my son will like this story later — I let her touch my belly. As she did, I considered how the fertility of famous women is a source of constant speculation in the media these days; this is the bump watch era. In a few years, just out of her teens, Johansson herself will be the subject of ovarian speculation on an epic scale. How strange to switch sides and see that even celebrities aren’t immune to belly infatuation.

Some people — Alexander Payne, Jason Schwartzman — were indifferent to the belly’s power, or too polite to mention the elephant in the room. But Neve Campbell put out her cigarette and made sure I got some water and, perhaps coolest of all, Robert Altman wished my unborn son the best. When publicists and journalists asked me the proverbial question, “How is your festival going?” I always answered, in between trips to the bathroom to throw up, “Very, very well.”

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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