Italian director Paolo Sorrentino ended his journey with Netflix, declaring during a debate held Tuesday in Cannes, France, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the launch of its film festival, that he no longer wanted to cooperate with the streaming platform, stressing the importance of attending films on big screens in theaters.
Award-winning Sorrentino said Oscar In 2014 for his movie “La Grande Belitsa” during a panel discussion on “The Future of Cinema” on Tuesday, in which he participated, along with other great directors such as Guillermo del Toro, Costa Gavras and Christian Mungiu, “I think (directing a movie for Netflix) is not something I would do again.”
His film “E Stata la Mano di Dio” (“The Hand of God”), which participated in the Venice Film Festival in September 2021, and deals with a personal tragedy that is the death of his parents poisoned by carbon monoxide, was shown on Netflix and was not released in cinemas in France.
And he said Sorrentino Who also directed the series “The Young Pop” starring Jude Law, “I’ve experimented with several presentation mediums, and made films for cinema and television, but in the end what I prefer is to direct films the way I did it in the beginning, as we do not feel the full force of a story except on a big screen.
He considered that “TV is not the place” for “big and beautiful” works. He predicted that people would “get tired of watching movies at home” and “go back to theaters”.
As for Mexican director Guillermo del Toro He is cooperating with Netflix on a number of projects, stressing that he is “reconciled with the changes taking place in the way films are presented,” stressing that the important thing is “telling stories.” He asked, “Are we discussing the size of the screen or the size of ideas?”
saw Festival Commissioner General Thierry Frémaux “The battle that everyone will fight is also to allow films produced by platforms to be shown in cinemas,” noting that the Cannes Festival regulations do not allow films that have not been shown in French cinemas to participate in the competition.
Frémaux has repeatedly expressed his wishes to change this rule, especially since the most important directors no longer hesitate to collaborate with platforms, such as Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion with Netflix, and soon Ridley Scott with Apple, and that viewers’ habits are changing. However, his calls are still opposed by the French cinema owners who are members of the festival’s board of directors.