Polaroids from Film Fest

This is what i wrote for the paper.
Carlos

I'm a big movie buff. I love movies.
So when my editors assigned me to photograph the Toronto
International Film Festival, I couldn't have been happier.
My job was to photograph celebrities at Yorkville hotels.
Only one problem: Hotel rooms.
Not exactly the best locations to work with. They all look the
same, dimly lit dungeons with bad wallpaper and nothing
expressing any kind of individuality.
In the minutes or sometimes seconds that publicists allow, it is
often difficult to make photographs that are more than pretty
pictures of celebrities.
So about a month before the festival I started thinking of how I
could bring something a little different to the coverage in the
paper.
After mulling it over I decided to do Polaroid photographs. I
wanted to bring back something old and simple in the age of
highly digital and complicated cameras.
I wanted the photos I took to express the personality of the
people I was photographing. Polaroids did exactly that.
The idea was simple. Take a Polaroid, hand it over and say,
"Could you please write something on this?"
I wanted the photos to be simple too. Out of focus, poorly
exposed, nothing mattered. The main thing was for the celebrities
to have a hand in making the photos their own.
Slowly, it caught on, and eventually it flew out of my hands.
When I walked in to photograph Tim Robbins he informed me that he
didn't like long photo shoots and that I would have a minute
to a minute and a half. After a generous two minutes
photographing Robbins, I showed him the Polaroids and told him of
the idea. He agreed and spent the next five or six minutes
creating his Polaroid.
These photographs might lack the shine and lustre of normal
celebrity photographs, but I feel they say more about the people
in them than anything else I could have done in a five-minute
hotel-room shoot.