Everybody knows what’s wrong with Hollywood—the vacuous parade of tentpole blockbusters; the refusal to diversify both in front of and behind the camera; the confusion in the face of disruptions by Netﬂix and Amazon; the single-minded lust for the 13-year-old-male dollar...one could go on and on. The faces in the accompanying portfolio are part of what’s right about Hollywood—a class of moviemakers navigating this supposedly barren landscape with new verve, carving out idiosyncratic careers and pointing the way forward with fresh stories, freshly told.

In a series of conversations, I spoke with that group—Ava DuVernay, Cary Fukunaga, James Gunn, Jeff Nichols, Jordan Peele, Dee Rees, Taylor Sheridan, and Edgar Wright (all pictured), plus Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer, Okja) and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman)—about the industry’s changing dynamics and how they’ve learned to work inside and outside the system.

On the future of “cinema”

GQ: Let’s start with a quote from an old man—albeit a Grand Old Man. Martin Scorsese recently said, “Cinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that I’m making, it’s gone. It should matter to your life. Unfortunately, the latest generations don’t know that it mattered so much.” I ask you, as one of the “latest generations”: Is he right?

[Edgar Wright: First of all, I want to say, “Marty, I paid $15 to see Silence, sir. I am not part of the problem.”

Cary Fukunaga: I ﬁnd it reductive to say that cinema is dead. That’s like saying painting is dead. Or theater is dead. But I get the anxiety that the stories that interest me most will be more and more rare as a theatrical experience.

Taylor Sheridan: I think we’re in a renaissance to a certain degree. The types of stories that I respond to and that I try to make—there are people consuming that kind of material. They haven’t evaporated. But where and how they digest that material is changing.

GQ: Okay, so let’s interpret “cinema” that way for a moment. How much does the movie theater—the building itself—still matter?

Ava DuVernay: I think it’s a question of what cinema is for you. I grew up in Compton, and there are no movie theaters in Compton. So I didn’t have access to cinema in the ways that most people think about it.

Bong Joon Ho: Throughout my childhood, Korea was under the military dictatorship. We didn’t have access to even VHS tapes. So I obsessed over what movies were on the TV timetable. Brian DePalma, Sam Peckinpah, John Carpenter: All of these, I watched on TV.

DuVernay: Yes, there’s certainly something about a cinematic experience in a traditional theater, but cinema has also become more about images expressing a certain feeling, mood, place and culture. I’ve had literally extraordinary experiences watching ﬁlms in all different ways: Watching ﬁlms on a lawn on a sheet. Watching ﬁlms in beautiful theaters with pristine sound and picture quality. Watching in bed on my iPad. I’ve had transformative experiences watching a ﬁlm at 30,000 feet, with the clouds going by and I’m under the blanket with my earphones in. “Cinema” is in the eye of the beholder. And I see it as something that’s morphing and growing and blossoming in different ways, as opposed to something that’s dying.

Jordan Peele: I think we’re in a great time right now, because we have the beauty of all these options in how to digest content. But I think the idea of the extinction of the theater is a tragedy. Especially today, when we are so separated by ideology and politics and anger.

Dee Rees: I do think there’s something about the power of watching in a group—of having to sit next to somebody who is not like you and experience this thing together.

James Gunn

Breakout films:

Guardians of the Galaxy; Slither

This year:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Up next:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3