My first evening at the Telluride Film Festival, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this weekend, the festival’s tireless and ebullient executive director, Julie Huntsinger, asked me whom I most wanted to meet. “Is Don DeLillo here?,” I asked. She led me over to a quiet corner where the author of White Noise was deep in conversation with two other people. The one with the beard filed away, and I realized that it was Ken Burns.
The woman in the circle stayed back, and as we fell into a long conversation about Burma, I was surprised by how much she knew about Aung San Suu Kyi. It was only after about 15 minutes that I registered that this friendly mom—I’d seen her with her kids strolling down the street—was Angelina Jolie. And that part of the special joy of this festival was that Angelina Jolie got to speak to one of America’s most reclusive novelists shortly before screening her latest, the 2017 film First They Killed My Father (some of which was shot in the Khmer language), in front of a large and discerning audience. And that I got to talk to both of them.
