On the future of âcinemaâ
GQ: Letâs start with a quote from an old manâalbeit a Grand Old Man. Martin Scorsese recently said, âCinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that Iâm making, itâs gone. It should matter to your life. Unfortunately, the latest generations donât know that it mattered so much.â I ask you, as one of the âlatest generationsâ: Is he right?
Edgar Wright: First of all, I want to say, âMarty, I paid $15 to see Silence, sir. I am not part of the problem.â
Cary Fukunaga: I ďŹnd it reductive to say that cinema is dead. Thatâs 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 weâre in a renaissance to a certain degree. The types of stories that I respond to and that I try to makeâthere are people consuming that kind of material. They havenât evaporated. But where and how they digest that material is changing.
GQ: Okay, so letâs interpret âcinemaâ that way for a moment. How much does the movie theaterâthe building itselfâstill matter?
Ava DuVernay: I think itâs a question of what cinema is for you. I grew up in Compton, and there are no movie theaters in Compton. So I didnât 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 didnât 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, thereâs 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. Iâve had literally extraordinary experiences watching ďŹlms in all different ways: Watching ďŹlms on a lawn on a sheet. Watching ďŹlms in beautiful theaters with pristine sound and picture quality. Watching in bed on my iPad. Iâve had transformative experiences watching a ďŹlm at 30,000 feet, with the clouds going by and Iâm under the blanket with my earphones in. âCinemaâ is in the eye of the beholder. And I see it as something thatâs morphing and growing and blossoming in different ways, as opposed to something thatâs dying.
