Tribeca has always been great about screening big movies, like “Speed Racer,” along with smaller indies and retrospective screenings. Why is that mixture so important to the festival?

Because it’s about the collective history and collective culture of telling stories and people being together and watching a movie. You want to have fun with it. And retrospectives are a great way of introducing new audiences to an old movie scene, seeing fresh takes on an old movie and also pay homage to the filmmakers. That’s something special. One of the things we do is have these talks after the movie. To be able to have the 50th anniversary of “Mean Streets” and have Marty and Bob come out and talk about it — but the twist is that you have Nas as the moderator. That gives it a fresh take in terms of how he viewed it. We try to balance what we’re doing. And again, because those events fill up big theaters for us, too. And it’s a good way of if somebody’s interested in some of those films, they’ll also maybe check out an independent film that they hadn’t heard about and discover something new.