Auteurs Now
This is where the most lines converge on this map, for a simple reason: the people here talk about where they came from. Tarantino puts it this way — when people ask if I went to film school, I tell them no, I went to films. He worked in a video rental store. Hong Kong action, spaghetti westerns, the New Wave, all of it pulled off a shelf. The first generation with the whole past within reach. So their films carry their origins on the surface. Guillermo del Toro has said that seeing the 1931 Frankenstein at seven taught him his own faith better than Sunday mass did. Of Creature from the Black Lagoon, seen at six: I loved that the creature was in love with her, I wanted them to end up together, so I decided I would someday have to correct that. Thirty years later he made The Shape of Water. Damien Chazelle says he watched Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg more than 200 times, and set out to see what happens when you run those older musical forms into reality. Accepting her screenplay Oscar, Sofia Coppola named the filmmakers who inspired the script: Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai, Bob Fosse and Godard. Barry Jenkins named Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien; Alfonso Cuaron named Ozu and Kore-eda; Celine Sciamma named the candlelight of Barry Lyndon; Paul Thomas Anderson named Robert Altman — if people want to call me Little Bobby Altman, I have no problem with that at all. S. S. Rajamouli named Braveheart, and specifically the way it builds feeling before the action. Tarantino has said of Seijun Suzuki that it was not the whole of him but particular shots, and the willingness to just experiment. Nolan on Kubrick's 2001: not a wasted shot, not a wasted word. Villeneuve still gets goosebumps from the ape scene he stayed up past bedtime to watch. Chloe Zhao names Terrence Malick as one of her mentors. Hideaki Anno has said that without seeing Akio Jissoji's work as a child there would be no Shin Godzilla. Every line running back from this node is made of words like those. That is why they are the darkest and the thickest.
There is also a fork in this era. Nolan says film is the closest technological analogue ever made to the way the eye sees, and in 2015, when Kodak was close to shutting its plant, he led six studios into a supply agreement that kept it open. Tarantino stands on that side. Cuaron stands on the other: when cinemas turned down Roma, he asked back — how many theatres did you think a black-and-white Mexican film, in Spanish and Mixteco, a drama without stars, would get as a conventional release? Scorsese spent seven years finding money for The Irishman. Protecting film and the cinema on one side; choosing where the work can actually land on the other. They do share something. In both cases the way we watch changed first, and the way films are made followed. What the video shelf did for the filmmakers of the nineties, streaming is doing again. In 2020 Parasite became the first film not in English to win Best Picture. And the middle is thinning: of the 62 films the five major studios released wide in the United States in 2024, only 20 cost less than $100 million.