On the future of ācinemaā
GQ: Letās start with a quote from an old manāalbeit a Grand Old Man. Martin Scorsese recently said, āCinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that Iām making, itās gone. It should matter to your life. Unfortunately, the latest generations donāt know that it mattered so much.ā I ask you, as one of the ālatest generationsā: Is he right?
Edgar Wright: First of all, I want to say, āMarty, I paid $15 to see Silence, sir. I am not part of the problem.ā
Cary Fukunaga: I ļ¬nd it reductive to say that cinema is dead. Thatās like saying painting is dead. Or theater is dead. But I get the anxiety that the stories that interest me most will be more and more rare as a theatrical experience.
Taylor Sheridan: I think weāre in a renaissance to a certain degree. The types of stories that I respond to and that I try to makeāthere are people consuming that kind of material. They havenāt evaporated. But where and how they digest that material is changing.
GQ: Okay, so letās interpret ācinemaā that way for a moment. How much does the movie theaterāthe building itselfāstill matter?
Ava DuVernay: I think itās a question of what cinema is for you. I grew up in Compton, and there are no movie theaters in Compton. So I didnāt have access to cinema in the ways that most people think about it.
Bong Joon Ho: Throughout my childhood, Korea was under the military dictatorship. We didnāt have access to even VHS tapes. So I obsessed over what movies were on the TV timetable. Brian DePalma, Sam Peckinpah, John Carpenter: All of these, I watched on TV.
DuVernay: Yes, thereās certainly something about a cinematic experience in a traditional theater, but cinema has also become more about images expressing a certain feeling, mood, place and culture. Iāve had literally extraordinary experiences watching ļ¬lms in all different ways: Watching ļ¬lms on a lawn on a sheet. Watching ļ¬lms in beautiful theaters with pristine sound and picture quality. Watching in bed on my iPad. Iāve had transformative experiences watching a ļ¬lm at 30,000 feet, with the clouds going by and Iām under the blanket with my earphones in. āCinemaā is in the eye of the beholder. And I see it as something thatās morphing and growing and blossoming in different ways, as opposed to something thatās dying.
