Wednesday afternoon we get the Hollywood Reporter review of MirrorMask. “If ‘The Wizard of Oz’ were reborn in the 21st century, it might look a lot like ‘MirrorMask,’” it begins, and after describing the film as “endlessly inventive with creativity to burn” continues in similar vein for several enthusiastic columns. That afternoon a reporter asks Dave if it was worth the eighteen months of toil and sweat, and he blinks and says, “Well, up until now I didn’t think it was. But yes, it was.”

We show MirrorMask to another enthusiastic audience of high school kids; to a couple of audiences of paying customers in Salt Lake City. I find myself getting into each screening, caring for nothing except the audience reactions: why does one audience laugh at one line and not at another? It’s the same film each time, isn’t it?

I go to a selection of short films. There are some duds, but the best of them, Brett Simon’s The Sailor’s Girl, is as good as anything I can remember. Everyone left takes the shuttle buses. I’m turning into a festival rat.

Back on Main Street, the festival’s still going but the crowds have gone. All the frenzied buying has been done, the celebrity swag has been looted. Our film officially premieres on Friday. I stop and talk to a couple of the buzz-people in red with clipboards, and they tell me they leave on Thursday. Our film can then, by definition, not have buzz. I don’t really mind. We got the Hollywood Reporter. We show MirrorMask to a packed premiere house and I have no idea whether anyone’s enjoying it or not. The audience is almost too respectful. I wish we’d been able to bring some of our cast in, particularly Stephanie Leonidas, our star. I wish the sound had been remixed for simple stereo and not crushed down from Dolby 5.1, burying several lines of dialogue. I wish that there were more kids in the audience. The questions are limp (“Did you make this film under hallucinogenics?”) and I find myself missing the high school audiences.

Afterwards, I drag my son to a sold-out midnight screening of The Aristocrats, on the basis that it’s the sort of film you ought to take your son to, then Dave McKean and I give up our seats so that Steve Buscemi can get in. We don’t mind. We go to the bar next door and start to discuss what our next film will be like.

The festival rats and the real people and the filmmakers are the only ones left at the tail end of Sundance.

Saturday afternoon’s the final MirrorMask screening. There are people in the wait list line for five hours. Some of them were at the premiere the night before. Some were also at the Salt Lake City showings. This audience seems to love it, laughing at the jokes, cheering and clapping. The questions they ask at the end are appreciative and smart.

If this is Sundance, I think, as it ends, I could get to like it.