Quentin Tarantino Declares 'Cinema Is Dead' After Filmmakers Go Digital
But the 51-year-old filmmaker says a lot has changed since his heydey in Hollywood.
Speaking at the festival, where he won the Palme d'Or grand prize in 1994 for "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino declared to journalists and critics that "cinema is dead."
He explained that screening films in digital is like forcing people to watch TV in public and he slammed current filmmakers for turning their backs on 35mm film.
"As far as I'm concerned, digital projection and DCPs is the death of cinema as I know it ... The fact that most films now are not presented in 35 mm means that the war is lost. Digital projections, that's just television in public. And apparently the whole world is OK with television in public, but what I knew as cinema is dead."
"Back in my day, you at least needed 16mm to make something, and that was a Mount Everest most of us couldn't climb. But why an established filmmaker would shoot on digital, I have no f------ idea at all."
Despite deeming the current flock of filmmakers "quite hopeless," Tarantino does have a bit of hope for future generations.
"I'm hopeful that we're going through a woozy romantic period with the ease of digital," he added. "I'm very hopeful that future generations will be much smarter than this generation and realize what they lost."
Tarantino also took issue with directors who never re-watch their old films. He tells WENN:
"Whenever I hear directors say they don't watch their movies or they can't watch their movies because they just see the flaws and it's too painful; I feel so sorry for those people. How can you get up in the morning? How can you do what you do if you think your stuff is so s-----? If it was too painful to watch my movies I wouldn't make another one. I would just give up at some point.
I feel bad for them. I feel like their lives aren't enriched as they could be. I watch my movies all the time. At home I have a lot of movie channels and they show the films uncut. I just hit the guide button and whenever I see one of my movies is playing I turn it on. Sometimes I watch a little bit and sometimes I watch the whole thing.
I hadn't seen 'Kill Bill Volume I' in a couple of years and I noticed it was going to be coming on, like, (network) Showtime 2 or something. I thought, 'I'll watch it through the bang bang you shot me down opening credits and that'll be it'. I'll be damned if I didn't watch that whole mother f-----' thing! I watched right down to the closing credits and I felt very gratified."