Nicholas Guerin/Contour

Published in the December 2013 issue

The cliché is now established: Television rules. One of its corollaries is that the movies are finished. Why drive all the way to the multiplex, pay a small fortune for tickets, sit in a crowded cellar smelling of coconut oil and adolescents, and try to concentrate with the flashing glare of strangers checking their phones when you can relax at home for free tweeting about Breaking Bad? You know what they talk about at movie parties these days? What they saw on television last night. The cultural dominance once taken for granted by the movies has begun to wane; the prominence of television continues to swell.

This fall, two films have appeared to challenge this new state of affairs: Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity and J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost. Both are movies that cannot be seen any other way except in the theater. Both are intense dramas of human experience outside an environment that can support human life, in space and in the middle of the Indian Ocean, respectively. Both are incredibly innovative reimaginings of the possibilities of cinema. Gravity, by the Mexico-born Cuarón, uses 3-D to offer the audience the terror of weightlessness. All Is Lost, by the New Jersey–born Chandor, is an almost entirely silent meditation on death. After a brief prologue, Robert Redford speaks, by my count, five words. You have never seen anything like either Gravity or All Is Lost, which is sort of the point of both of them.

ESQUIRE: You're actually in the process of releasing a movie (Gravity) and a television show (Believe, on NBC) at the same time. Do you think TV is replacing the movies?

ALFONSO CUARÓN: Let's face it, TV has been offering, for the mainstream, better storytelling. But by the same token, even though it gives a much better narrative than Hollywood films, rarely does TV achieve pure cinematic moments.

ESQ: Was that what you were looking for in Gravity, a pure cinematic moment?

AC: There is a language that can only be conveyed through cinema. I think most of the films we see are just illustrated narratives. Remember something: Most people just half-watch TV. They watch TV while they are doing many other things in the environment of their home. So what they are doing goes through their ears as much as through their eyes. In television, the narrative and characters are in the foreground of everything, because you are watching TV as you do other stuff. You're following the narrative. And when it's great, it's amazing. When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.

ESQ: I did find that even though this year was one of the greatest years in the history of television, the moments I remember come from the movies.

AC: It's seldom that you find great moments in television. Usually you remember — in Breaking Bad or any of these other great shows — you re-member situations or charac-ters. Not moments. But I have to say, I can make the same argument for mainstream movies, which have bad narratives and also no memorable moments. People point the finger at studios or exhibitors, but the truth of the matter is that there's also an audience. I went to Telluride and it was just amazing, the strength of cinema — not necessarily mainstream cinema but world cinema. There's amazing stuff going on. But it's not what I would call mainstream. The difference is that in television, the great shows are mainstream.

ESQ: Do you think television is getting better and movies are getting worse?

AC: Definitely things are changing, but by the same token you do have some mainstream movies that are very powerful. It was only two years ago that we had Inception — that is a mainstream film that is also very, very interesting. In the seventies, great mainstream films were the norm. Now they're the exception. Also, documentaries are becoming very strong. The narrative level in documentaries is starting to become so strong that it starts to blur the line between documentaries and fiction. A lot of contemporary documentaries are structured more as fiction than as documentaries. And it's an exciting thing.

ESQ: But you can get those unique experiences only in film.

AC: It depends on what you call a unique experience. I just saw the Woody Allen film [Blue Jasmine], and I thought it was just amazing. It's not that it's going to give you a roller coaster of a ride. It's just an amazing film. But definitely there are directors, even in the mainstream cinema, in Hollywood, people like [David] Fincher and Wes Anderson and David O. Russell and Guillermo del Toro, who are doing really exciting mainstream cinema.

ESQ: So you don't buy the argument that television is going to replace the movies anytime soon?

AC: I don't think that way. I think that if anything, unknown formats will challenge not just cinema but television. And we don't know what's going to happen. What is happening is that we don't live in an era of one or two paradigms, of TV and films. We're living in an era in which the paradigms are constantly evolving, coexisting with many other paradigms. And it's not just the media, like TV, cinema, Internet, or whatever. People are going to be watching film at home very soon. The big difference right now is not TV itself. It has to do with the means of distribution of that TV, meaning cable has allowed more freedom so great storytellers can be doing great stuff on television without running into the conventional codes. And I think that's been a fundamental distinction. The film industry is in good shape. In terms of ideas, it's a different thing. In terms of audiences, the audiences still go to the movies. I have to say both are healthy — cinemagoers and TV viewers. At the same time, we're growing a new generation for which maybe both formats are too long. There's a new generation that's been growing up with the attention span of YouTube. That's the thing. I think the future is just going to be different paradigms.

ESQ: Are you going to direct your first YouTube video?

AC: You know what? If you want to keep on being relevant as a director, I think you have to embrace the times. And with the times come technologies and formats. Most 3-D films are crap. Those films are crap because they are not 3-D. In most of those films, the 3-D is pure commercial afterthought. Those are not conceived and designed in 3-D. They convert the films into 3-D. The problem is that when you don't follow a conception, you're not honoring the medium.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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