Alejandro González Iñárritu might be the one person alive who hasn’t seen Avengers: Endgame. The humanistic filmmaker, who took home Best Director at the Academy Awards for his last two movies [Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and The Revenant], spoke very candidly at the Sarajevo Film Festival about the state of modern cinema. Spoiler: he’s not a fan.
In the past, Iñárritu said, films “were exploring different ways of telling stories, trying to push language. Those have disappeared. Now it’s the big tentpoles… or the TV streaming experience.” (Steven Soderbergh might have something to say about that crack at streaming.) “The need of plot and narrative is so much that it’s starting to deform the way we can explore themes,” he continued. “People are very impatient now, they are like, ‘Give me more. Kill somebody! Do something.’ It is changing so fast that now the films have to immediately please the audience. They have to be global and they have to make a lot of money, so now they become a Coca-Cola commercial that has to please the world.”
tfw when movies are Coke commercials.
Iñárritu also made an, um, interesting comparison between [extremely “Old Man Yells at Cloud” voice] Movies These Days and the world’s oldest profession. He called cinema “the most important art form in the world,” but it’s become “an orgy of interests that are in the same bed with poetic principles, but at the same time, it’s also a whore that charges money… The mercenaries of money just want to make — how do they call it in the studios in the United States? They call it ‘content to fill the pipelines.’ That’s how they express it in the studios.”
So… his next movie won’t be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, then?
(Via Variety)
