On the future of “cinema”

GQ: Let’s start with a quote from an old man—albeit a Grand Old Man. Martin Scorsese recently said, “Cinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that I’m making, it’s gone. It should matter to your life. Unfortunately, the latest generations don’t know that it mattered so much.” I ask you, as one of the “latest generations”: Is he right?

Edgar Wright: First of all, I want to say, “Marty, I paid $15 to see Silence, sir. I am not part of the problem.”

Cary Fukunaga: I find it reductive to say that cinema is dead. That’s 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 we’re in a renaissance to a certain degree. The types of stories that I respond to and that I try to make—there are people consuming that kind of material. They haven’t evaporated. But where and how they digest that material is changing.

GQ: Okay, so let’s interpret “cinema” that way for a moment. How much does the movie theater—the building itself—still matter?

Ava DuVernay: I think it’s a question of what cinema is for you. I grew up in Compton, and there are no movie theaters in Compton. So I didn’t 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 didn’t 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, there’s 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. I’ve had literally extraordinary experiences watching films in all different ways: Watching films on a lawn on a sheet. Watching films in beautiful theaters with pristine sound and picture quality. Watching in bed on my iPad. I’ve had transformative experiences watching a film at 30,000 feet, with the clouds going by and I’m under the blanket with my earphones in. “Cinema” is in the eye of the beholder. And I see it as something that’s morphing and growing and blossoming in different ways, as opposed to something that’s dying.

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