Guillermo del Toro Leads Cannes Symposium on Film’s Future: ‘What We Have Now Is Unsustainable’
24.05.2022 - 20:11
/ thewrap.com
th Cannes. “In so many ways, what we have belongs to an older structure. Whether we want it to or not, the future will show up.”But, he added, the change in the movie business is only part of a wider change across society.
“When we look at the entire structure of how we are as a race, a community, it is shifting,” he said. “It took one pandemic to shake it all up. And we survived the pandemic because we had three things: food, medicine and stories.”The Mexican director didn’t dismiss streaming services like Netflix or the move of many directors to long-form projects for TV, but he made a point about the difference in media.
“Are there great works on TV? Yeah. But do they have the scale of movies? Not very often. TV can generate great drama, and sometimes it generates great storytelling, but rarely does it generate great images on a big scale the way movies do.“I was born in 1964, and I saw ‘Vertigo’ on video many times.
But the moment I saw it on the big screen, I realized that I had never seen it.”And there’s another part of the streaming culture that he can’t tolerate. “There are two things that entered our lexicon five years ago that are horrible,” he said. “Content and pipeline.
They describe oil, water or sewage – they don’t describe cinema. They describe something that you flush through, that has to keep moving.”Still, he said he was on hand to ask questions, not to expect answers. “I think there are many answers to what the future is,” he said.
“And the future doesn’t belong to us – it belongs to itself. So I’m not afraid of anything, I’m at peace with the form changing. But I think we have to question ourselves: Are we arguing about the size of the screens or the size of the ideas?”Cannes General Delegate Thierry
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