On Friday, the Dallas International Film Festival will begin showing 77 films at six different venues—including a skatepark!—across the city. James Faust is DIFF’s longtime creative director, the man who spends his year watching hundreds of selections that he gets to winnow down and figure out how to bring to town.
Over the years, he’s also helped shepherd an intoxicated Harry Dean Stanton from the Balcony Club to his hotel (there’s more to that when you listen), met Joan Jett while working on Walker, Texas Ranger (there’s more to that, too), and fell in love with film after watching E.T. five times in a day when he was a kid. We talk about all that, but the crux of the chat is DIFF, which will show films such as Acidman, with Thomas Haden Church; documentaries about jazz musicians Roy Hargrove and Louis Armstrong; and more than a few shorts that made James cry.
In this podcast (the player is below), James mentioned that he’d been in three car chases in his life. We didn’t have time to go into it. But then we recorded an episode of “EarBurner After Dark” in which he told us all about it, and Tim used a bunch of gratuitous swearing. We won’t put that up here on FrontBurner. You have to subscribe to the podcast to get that saucy content. Listen on your favorite podcatcher.
Author
