I really don’t like Sundance. And then it’s midnight and Dave and Lisa Henson and I are standing in a chilly alley, waiting to get in to see David Slade’s Hard Candy, and I notice that none of the people in the line are even slightly glamorous. The glamorous people are at parties. These are the festival rats, shivering at midnight to see a new movie. It helps that the film is sharp and small, essentially a grim and grueling two-hander. I start to realize that there are more Sundances than I had previously noticed.

Our film doesn’t premiere until the end of the festival, but our first screening is in Salt Lake City for an audience of high school kids. We arrive for the last twenty minutes. Dave McKean is too worried to go in, but I do. I’m watching the magical imagery of MirrorMask on a big screen. Up until now I’ve only seen it in various stages of completion tiny on my laptop screen. This is something else.

The audience claps. The lights come up. A fifteen-year-old girl near me turns to her friend and says, “That was soooo amaaaaaaaaazing,” and I breathe out. It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for eighteen months. Our first review. Dave and I answer questions, then we sign things for the teens. One girl gets us to sign her arms: she has no idea who we are, but we made that film and it made her happy.

Dave appears to be cheering up.

We go and see a film that looked good from the Sundance program, and it’s mediocre in most of the ways a film can be—poorly acted, badly shot, and the plot again has been lifted from an old Twilight Zone episode. Oddly, this also cheers us up. Our film may not be perfect, but it was better than that. No teenage girls are asking the director to sign their limbs.

The interviews start. Some in person, some over the phone. Nobody’s seen the film yet. We could tell them anything. I see—and, to my surprise, love—Kung Fu Hustle. It’s like a gift from Sundance. Utterly fun, and nothing Rod Serling would have found in any way familiar.

Wednesday morning, we go and see my friend Penn Jillette’s film The Aristocrats, directed by Paul Provenza. I’m prepared to be polite about it, in the way you have to be when you know it’s a film by a friend about a hundred comedians discussing one, not very funny, dirty joke. Instead Dave and I find ourselves transfixed and delighted. It’s an incredibly funny, filthy, and peculiarly cathartic film about art and why we make it. We tell the filmmakers how much we liked their film, and they tell us they want to come and see MirrorMask. We tell them that they probably don’t want to, and that it doesn’t have any swearing in it, but they insist. Penn has altitude sickness (“Pretty f——g ironic for a guy who’s six foot seven,” says Paul Provenza) and will be going home early.