Cinema chains need to drastically improve the experience they offer to customers or the next generation of moviegoers will stop going, the film director Christopher Nolan has said.

British-born Nolan, one of the most the powerful film-makers in the world, was speaking at the London Film Festival (LFF) on Friday about the importance of using real film, as opposed to digital technology. That includes cinemas still having projectors to show, for example, 70mm film.

But there was a bigger problem that the cinema chains needed to address, he said. “For some reason, it has become acceptable to say [to audiences] we are providing this empty room with a TV in it and just watch a film.

“That has to change and if it doesn’t change, forget film, forget digital, if that experience for the audience is not valued … people stop going.”

He said surveys saying younger people did not value going to the cinema were “complete bollocks … the experience has to be something great or of course people don’t want to come”.

Nolan, the director of epics such as Interstellar and Inception, was speaking at a debate on the importance of using real film.

“I have conversations with studio heads and at some point when I’m passionately advocating using film they’ll say ‘at the end of the day doesn’t storytelling trump everything?’

“I say ‘no it doesn’t, otherwise we’d be making radio plays, it would be a lot cheaper.’ ”

Despite the pressure to go digital there were still plenty of directors using film or perhaps returning to it, he said.

Cinemas need to have the projectors to show it and he praised Quentin Tarantino for arranging for 70mm projectors to be installed in 100 cinemas so people could watch his next film The Hateful Eight as it was meant to be seen.

Nolan said the film industry went through periods of technological advancement that sometimes confused what should be a core value – for example, the 1980s fashion of “colourising” black-and-white films.

“I don’t think people are being made aware enough that any digital transfer from film is only ever going to be a translation of the original material … there is always a difference.”

He rejected the economic arguments that are sometimes made to defend the increasing use of digital

“What has crept in is that it has become acceptable for [cinema] theatre owners or distributors to say film is more expensive,” and then for audiences to just accept it without seeing any reduction in ticket prices.

He was joined at the debate by the visual artist Tacita Dean, who is known for working in 16mm and 35mm film.

Dean said it had felt like her artistic medium, film, was being taken away from her in 2011 and she became a founding member of savefilm.org.

“Film was in existential danger,” she said. “It felt like I wouldn’t be able to make my work or even see it.

“In the art world, medium cannot be obsolete and that was the big issue, there has not been a time historically that a medium which has made so much has come under such a threat … I think people have realised and we have turned a corner. It did feel like there was this huge cultural misunderstanding.”



The BFI’s creative director, Heather Stewart, said the institute was the world’s largest lender of film prints but, after it was pointed out that it regularly showed films digitally, she acknowledged it could do better.

The debate was the first of a new LFF Connects series at the festival, now in its 59th year, in which industry figures will explore the future of film and how it engages with other creative industries.