The Tribeca Festival was born out of a need to revitalize downtown New York City following the September 11 attacks. Spearheaded by Robert De Niro, producer Jane Rosenthal, and investor Craig Hatkoff, the festival pulled New York’s creative community together, drawing big names like Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, and Whoopi Goldberg. Twenty-five years later, the festival has expanded its scope to include talks, a podcasting track, a gaming section, and television premieres.

At this year’s Tribeca, you can attend talks between Madonna and Jimmy Fallon, Sean Penn and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, and Teyana Taylor and filmmaker Janicza Bravo. You can visit New York’s Pier 57 to play demos of exclusive upcoming games or attend a live podcast taping with The New Yorker’s David Remnick with Jon Lovett. Or you can watch the premiere of a fully AI-generated docudrama called Dreams of Violet, about the Iranian civilian resistance to the authoritarian regime.

Rosenthal has been at the center of these changes, from launching the festival to adapting itputting on the festival during COVID-19. Below, she talks about the festival’s latest incarnation, how her day job as a producer taught her how to roll with the punches, and some of her favorite memories from the festival’s storied 25 years.

Vanity Fair: The first Tribeca Festival was produced in just 120 days. Describe what that experience was like.

Jane Rosenthal: “No” was not an option. We wanted to bring people back downtown to give our neighbors something to look forward to. And there was sort of an uptown-downtown divide. People didn’t want to come downtown, and it was depressing. So we’re going to put on a show. Whenever people got upset or something wasn’t going to work, what are we going to do? The answer was to look left. And just look at the hole in our neighborhood.

What was the biggest obstacle?

Well, ignorance was bliss. There was a part of me that was like, Oh, what’s sponsorship? So I figure out what sponsorship is, and then it’s like, Oh, we’ve got to get how much money? It was kind of crazy. But it was just like, We’ll do it. We have to do it. “No” wasn’t an option.

Flash forward 25 years. The festival has expanded tremendously. What has that process been like?

It was organic for us to add talks and even music to the festival. Again, part of what we were trying to do is bring people back downtown. There was an economic and emotional reason for doing that. The first set of theaters that we went into at Battery Park, we were going in with hazmat suits to make sure they were going to get cleaned up. Then, as the years went by, you were building the Goldman Sachs building in front of the theaters. I’ve always looked at our competition as New York City itself, and how do you get the attention of New York City? So let’s have Tom Hanks talking to Bruce Springsteen at the Beacon. That’s something people want to see. That’s how that kind of stuff evolved.