TORONTO -- After nearly four decades of sitting in darkened theatres, Piers Handling is looking forward to exploring the outdoors.
The longtime director and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival is stepping down from his position after this year's instalment, its 43rd, which runs Sept. 6-16.
And while he plans to continue attending TIFF as a cinephile, he is excited to start other ventures -- from travelling and reading, to hitting the slopes and writing a book on the history of film festivals.
"I'm a big outdoors person, I'm a big skiier, so I'll be able to ski every day of the week now, whenever I want to, as opposed to just the weekends," Handling said in a recent interview.
"All the summer sports have been taken away from me for basically over 35 years -- tennis, swimming, kayaking, sailing -- so I'm looking forward to that."
Handling joined TIFF in 1982 and has been CEO and director since 1994, building what was once known as the Toronto Festival of Festivals in the Yorkville neighbourhood into one of the biggest of its kind in the world with its own permanent downtown home and year-round film hub in TIFF Bell Lightbox.
"I feel really proud about the year-round programming we've built up," said Handling, sitting in a lounge in the Lightbox, which includes screening rooms, exhibitions, programs, and lectures.
"I don't think people thought that a festival could actually do that. We've turned ourselves into a one-stop shopping, very comprehensive film organization, and into the top echelon of international film festivals."
When Handling leaves, he'll be replaced by a two-headed structure. One co-head is current artistic director Cameron Bailey and the other is Joana Vicente, who has also been appointed executive director.
Handling hired Bailey in 2008, and together they travelled to screening rooms in far-flung locales as they crafted the festival over the years.
"He's a remarkably bold thinker for a man who seems quite quiet and reserved in many ways, but he's revolutionary," Bailey said.
"The Lightbox is a result of his thinking. Everybody told him it was a crazy idea but he knew that there was a value and that the city was mature enough to support something like this."
Handling was also a mentor and inspiration who was thoughtful and unafraid to voice his opinions and defend them, he added.
"He's both somebody who is an intellectual and an esthete in a way, but he's also an outdoorsman, which is a surprising combination, perhaps," Bailey said.
"He's a great hiker. He used to climb mountains in his younger days. He has that need to be out in nature as well, which most of us who love movies just don't have. We're happy inside but he needs to be outside as well."
J. Miles Dale, the Oscar-winning Toronto producer behind "The Shape of Water," called Handling a "visionary" for building TIFF into a year-round cultural mainstay and the festival itself into "a powerhouse."
"There's Cannes but really after that there's TIFF," Dale said. "He not only saw how to take it to that next level but he did it, which was I think the trickiest of all."
TIFF senior programmer Steve Gravestock said Handling nurtured scores of Canadian talent and made the festival grow.
"He turned it from a really strong festival into one that's treated very seriously, both because he paid attention to the art but he also paid attention to the business, to the industry," Gravestock said.
"I don't know all the other festival directors but I can't imagine anybody loves movies more than he does. It's really heartening. When I'm like, 'I've seen enough,' he's still going. You get that love when he talks about his favourite directors. I've never heard anybody analyze a movie, break it apart, as intelligently or as clearly as he does."
Director Jennifer Baichwal, who is at this year's festival with "Anthropocene: The Human Epoch," called Handling a "true cinephile" and "an incredible gentleman."
"He's a real national treasure, in my opinion, and I'm sad that he's going," Baichwal said.
"I also think it's OK, because it's the beginning of the next chapter, but he leaves a real legacy and they're going to be big shoes to fill."
Filling those shoes involves moving forward on TIFF's five-year strategic plan, which began in January of this year.
Bailey helped draft the plan, which he said aims to listen to TIFF's audience and understand who they are, what they want and how the organization can play a role in their lives.
"We need to reach people in their homes, we need to reach them on their phones," Bailey said.
"We need to understand that their appetite for art that challenges them, and that goes beyond the commercial mainstream, has many different articulations -- and it's not just coming to one event in one place one time of year that will satisfy that. They want that always on in their lives and we think we can provide that."
Here are some of his most memorable moments from his career at TIFF, which began in 1982 and saw him appointed CEO and director in 1994:
Casual Encounters with the Stars
"There are relaxed moments, what I call festival moments, that just surprise you: you walk into a restaurant or you walk into a bar and it's relaxed and informal," Handling says.
"You've caught them away from the red carpet and you sort of know them."
Many of those moments happened at the now-closed restaurant Bistro 990, where stars often dined.
"You'd find Brian de Palma huddled off in a corner having lunch," Handling recalls.
"Then later on you'd go upstairs and there would be late-night parties in the Bistro ... where you'd hear Steven Soderbergh here and Stellan Skarsgard there and everyone is having a drink and it's very relaxed."
Then there was the late-night festival hospitality hotel suite, where talent including Julie Christie and Fernando Birri would gather after screenings in the earlier days of TIFF.
"You had a little jukebox and a little radio and then you'd put some music," Handling says.
"You're talking about cinema, you're talking about politics, you're talking about life experiences, and those of course are the moments you remember the most -- those intimate moments."
The Formal Yet Sometimes Surprising Moments
"You meet people behind the stage, in the screening room -- some crazy incredible stories in the green room," Handling says.
He recalls one French filmmaker's strange behaviour at a gala, where "he actually ran around the green room and bounced off the walls and off the couches. I'd never seen this experience ever."
Handling later learned that was a ritual for the filmmaker, who "was completely professional" when he went onstage.
"He does this every time before his premiere," he says. "It's his way of letting off steam."
Technical Difficulties
"I've had screenings break down, films burn in the gate," Handling says.
"I remember when we opened Perspective Canada one year with a film called 'A Winter Tan.' Five filmmakers, it was jointly signed -- Jackie Burroughs, John Walker, a few other people -- and the film went on upside down.
"I remember I was in the foyer of the cinema and Jackie coming out just incensed, enraged. We had to stop the screening and the whole bit, pounding on the door of the projection booth. Poor projectionist."
