Me and you and nobody else we know: How to score 96 hours alone with Danny Boyle

What’s a film freak gotta do to get locked in a room with Danny Boyle for four days? Win a spot in TIFF’s Talent Lab, that’s what. The Lab is a six-year old festival program, wherein 25 aspiring filmmakers are hand-picked and then guided through four intensive days of workshops, networking and good, old-fashioned gabbing with as many hot-shit industry insiders as TIFF execs wrangle. Yesterday we attended the 2009 Talent Lab launch, where this year’s picks gathered to find out exactly who TIFF execs could lay their hands on.

The answer: pretty much anyone they want. Besides drop-in guests like Tilda Swinton and Jane Campion, Labbers will benefit from the tutelage of four main “governors,” who volunteer for the entire 96-hour stint: Mr. Slumdog himself, hipster jack-of-all-trades Miranda July, Blindness writer/star Don McKellar and John Collee, the Aussie screenwriter who penned Creation, this year’s opening film.