Alejandro González Iñárritu and Chloé Zhao on the future of cinema: "Young people are dying to feel more"

For years, film industry watchers have been warning anyone willing to listen that young people's lack of interest in serious films could ultimately lead to the death of cinema. But Chloé Zhao and Alejandro González Iñárritu aren't ready to sound the alarm just yet.

Zhao recently sat down with Iñárritu for a conversation about directing at Bardo Experience, a Netflix event promoting Iñárritu's new film “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” which depicts Mexico in the international race for the Oscars this year. The topic eventually turned to the future of cinema as an art form, with Zhao predicting that the future can be bright as long as filmmakers don't play it safe. Watch the full conversation in the video below.

"Sometimes a story told objectively, I can sit back and watch, there's always some security. Your films always, whether it's through the brilliant sound design, the cinematography, all your planning and all the deep and dark work that you do yourself, that I'm driven, I can't not experience it," Zhao said. "The future of cinema, young people today, they want feel more, they're dying to feel more and we can't give them the same stuff anymore."

Iñárritu said he believes film's versatility puts it in a unique position to elicit these emotions, and that conventional films only scratch the surface of the medium's capabilities.

“I think cinema is a very generous medium,” Iñárritu said. "I always say it's water, cinema is water. It can be expressed in a cloud or in a cup of tea or as rain or as a pond, as a river, as an ocean. L Water can express itself in so many things, that's why there are so many genres, there are so many types of films, expressions, possibilities, it's amazing, generous and malleable. But personally, I am now interested in a way to use, say, water in such a way that it flows inside."

He went on to say that, to achieve this effect, filmmakers must deconstruct cinema as an art form and make films that break with established structures in an effort to communicate a deeper truth.

"It's not just an objective technical experience with a very conventional language of close up, close up, two shots, over the shoulder, wide shot, master, next, close up, close up, par it's the medium of storytelling," he said. "Storytelling in film, it was born, it got attached later, but the possibility that the juxtaposition of time and space, images and light can be used to experience us and perhaps trigger unconscious possibilities without the rationality of act one, act two, act three, plot, storytelling, boy meets girl, blah, blah , blah. I suddenly wanted to explore this possibility because these are my favorite films. Movies that I don't understand how were made without a story and suddenly there's something that makes me grow as a soul."

“Bardo” airs on Netflix on December 16.

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