‘I’m a film-maker because of him’: Herzog, Swinton, Rushdie and more on Tom Luddy, cinema’s quiet titan

Tom Luddy in Telluride, riding the chairlift that transports people up and down the mountain. Photograph: Courtesy of Julie Huntsinger

Almost 50 years ago, Tom Luddy co-founded the Telluride film festival, a small and enormously influential long weekend that takes place every year over the Labor Day weekend high in the Colorado mountains.

Telluride is not like other film festivals. It is intimate and inclusive and democratic. Everyone mixes with everyone else – anathema to the likes of Cannes or Venice.