“Cinema is Dead” – Nicolas Winding Refn

Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn has been declaring “cinema dead” since the middle of last year. If you were also promoting your new streaming platform, you might say the same, too. But it’s something I have been saying for a while, and I don’t have a streaming platform to promote.

I don’t think cinema is dead, but I do believe cinema (and music and TV and other culture) has been transformed by the digital revolution. My age and career has set me perfectly to have an overview of that change.

When I was a kid, I remember stacking up vinyl 45s on my record player. My Dad made my first record player from old record player parts and a box he made by hand. If you stacked too many 45s on the centre pin, the records would start to slip when the pile got too high.

My early cinema experiences were thrilling. A cinema theatre was a special place where dreams came to life, for a couple of hours. This was added to the fun me and my best friend Steven had, crawling under the seats and generally making mischief during a almost empty Saturday matinee screening.

It took about 5 years for the big event movies to make it to the TV screen and hence that TV premiere was almost as huge a moment as the cinema release. Plus if you missed the film at the cinema that was your chance missed for 5 years.

Meanwhile, VCRs were invented. My brother bought one and it blew my 14 year old mind – you could record anything from the TV! I recorded American Graffiti (directed by George Lucas before Star Wars) and watched it every day after school for a week.

Around that time, CDs were invented. But I was busy buying up discarded original Beatles vinyl albums 2nd. I still have those albums 40 years later, with the Harum Records price stickers on them…

In the 90s, MP3s and the internet coincided. The music industry which I earned a living from was decimated.

Then vinyl made a come back, because people liked the retro romance aspect and also liked the idea of owning something physical from their favorite bands. But vinyl will never return to the level of sales experienced in the 1960s and 1970s.

I was at a film festival a few years ago, talking to a producer who was panicking because a movie he was involved in was selling for a 10th of the price it would have a few years before – because of piracy and streaming. I told him about what happened to me and the music biz and that we were on the same journey with film, now.

“But there’s no live cinema!” he complained and hurried off before I made him more depressed.

Well, there is live theatre. But of course theatre and film are further apart than recorded songs and their live versions.

“We have to destroy the past by wiping the slate clean and saying that, ‘yes cinema is dead, but filmmaking is very much alive’. It’s alive at year zero, it’s like the third Lumiere brother saying, ‘we’ve just invented steaming’,” says Refn.

“As an industry, we’re trying to take our past into our future, and we’re constantly failing both financially and artistically,” suggested the director, at a talk in the filmmaker’s hometown of Copenhagen as part of the CPH: DOX festival on Friday (March 29).

“It doesn’t mean that going to the cinema isn’t beautiful or wonderful or something we all like to do, including myself, but the reality is in the future the audience will consume content on their telephones. Instead of fighting that or trying to villainise that, we have to embrace it and say that the telephone coexists with the cinema screen. Neither is better or worse, it’s just coexistence. If you can’t make content that’s as good on a smartphone as in a cinema, you won’t survive.

“The cinema world needs to adapt to the future, [filmmakers] don’t need to adapt to the old system. The cinema industry has to embrace the cellphone. Through that, we’ll get a much more harmonic idea of what the future will be like. If they don’t, it will continue to demise. Right now the only thing keeping cinema alive is American superhero blockbusters.

“I have a theory that very soon people won’t be watching anything in its entirety, not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t have to…”

He also doesn’t believe future generations will pay for content. He says his young cousins have never paid for film, TV or music, in their lives – pirating is easy. “The problem is, most films are shit, so why would you want to spend money on it? The future will have to become free. Millennials will not be paying for entertainment. The question is, how do you monetise free?”

I think because I have already been through this with the music industry (20 years ago now), I’m not shocked or too saddened. In fact, it’s not just film, music and other culture but all kinds of things we used to get paid for. Hence the ongoing discussion about oncoming mechanisation of jobs.

But I did watch an interesting talk on YouTube (for free! 😉 where social and economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin talks about The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy. Recommended viewing.

In an age where things can be copied in seconds, how do you create value? How do we earn a living from what we do?

Well, perhaps the answers are there, but our eyes are so fixed on the past, we can’t see the future. We often hear filmmakers complain that Soderbergh or someone has used an iPhone “as a gimmick. It’s just marketing the phone”.

Maybe that is an answer to the problem, rather than a problem itself. Supposing Soderbergh did get paid (or financially encouraged) to use an iPhone to help Apple market their smartphones, then perhaps that tells us something about the way we could earn money ourselves for our films: as indirect marketers of physical products.

You can’t (yet) copy an iPhone with your 3D printer in seconds, or a Zhiyun Smooth 4 Gimbal. But you might get paid to encourage others to buy one by using one to make a great movie.

I’m not saying this is the answer, but it might be worth thinking about? And keep thinking.

So cinema isn’t dead. But the reasons for watching a film at a theatre have changed dramatically since I first fell in love with the cinematic experience. We used to have to go if we wanted to see the film (or wait 5 years). Now we often don’t need to wait any length of time at all. And if we do, well there’s endless content on Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Snapchat… and so on.

When it comes to the relationship between creator (filmmaker) and consumer (audience), the power has flipped. The audience are now in complete control of a filmmaker’s future more than ever before. Make your audience wait and you are gone in a click of a remote button.

And that goes for the experience of watching the film as well as the wait for the release. These days, I see the first 20 minutes of films more often than I see a whole film. That’s how long I give a streamed movie before I click away, if it hasn’t grabbed me.

As filmmakers we really need to let go of the past, no matter how romantic it seems. Those classic movies were made in different conditions for different audiences, who had little choice but to see your film in a cinema. Those audiences had more time and more patience, because they weren’t under continuous assault from online advertising and content.

There used to be queues at cinemas. Now the content providers are queuing up on our devices waiting for our attention. The roles have reversed.

I was reading an article in the Guardian about how a generation gap had appeared, because teenagers were finding music on YouTube, in ways that bewildered older generations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it’s the article writer who is bewildered.

Finding music on YouTube is not the equivalent of me rummaging through vinyls at my local Harum Records. That’s because the YouTube algorithm finds you. That’s how YouTube (and other platforms) work.

The reason 25 year olds are not hearing music written for 13 year olds is because YouTube knows not to play it to them. Once YouTube gets a sense of who you are and what you like, it will feed you as much of that stuff as it can find. This means younger audiences finding stuff on YouTube are perhaps more passive than we used be. It’s not the Radio 1 DJ who’s the star maker now, but the YouTube recommend system.

And that system is working for all media and marketing – including film. If we are still making films to fit the old system, then we could find ourselves left behind.

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