"I was walking off the stage," recalled Doremus sitting on a patio on the lot of Paramount Pictures, who bought the film at the festival, "and one of the studio heads from another studio that didn't end up acquiring the movie came up to me and said, 'I just put in an offer on your movie.' I was literally walking off the stage from a Q&A. That alone was like, 'This might be a little different year.'"
For his first film as director, Fiennes did not make it easy on himself, undertaking a modern-day interpretation of Shakespeare's relentlessly hard-bitten war drama "Coriolanus." He took the lead role, having played it on stage some years ago, and then rounded out his cast with such notable names as Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler, Brian Cox and Jessica Chastain.
