If anything, the oddest battle that I've been fighting over the years, which also appears to be uphill, is on the issue of movie presentation formats.

Really, even a lot of people who make a living in movies -- people who are successful -- don't seem to care that much.

I think that a lot of people fall back to the argument that filmmaking is fundamentally about story-telling, and that the important thing is that people get to see your story. Everything else comes in at a distant second.

Well, filmmaking is a storytelling medium. It's also a visual storytelling medium. Also, as Ansel Adams said of photography, "The negative is the orchestration. The print is the symphony."

To say that it wouldn't make any sense to see the Hateful 8 in the Ultra 70 Roadshow format because you'll get the same story on streaming is the same as saying that I was dumb to drop $200 on Muse tickets, because I can just listen to them for free, or next to free on the internet.

Why do revival theaters exist?

I can watch Once Upon a Time in the West on my laptop for no money right now; but, if there's a 35mm print screening anywhere near me, you bet your ass I'm going to see that.

Some of this does come from my vocation. I've had movies on which I served as the cinematographer get into festivals with projection that made my carefully designed images look like shit.

Still, on the flip side of the revival theaters is what people miss out on when they figure that they'll get the same movie for a lot cheaper watching it on a mobile device, or on a TV, than seeing it as the artists intended.

I saw Dunkirk on 15/70 five times in the auditorium and several more times from the booth six years ago. I've watched my Blu-Ray and digital copies a few times since; but, its just not the same fucking movie. It's still great. It's just not the experience that it once was.

In an odd way, I would expect less push back if I said that I was going to spend $20 on a ticket to see a 70mm screening of Lawrence of Arabia when I have a digital copy at home than I would get for saying that I'm spending a premium to see Oppenheimer (possibly three times now) on 70mm IMAX.

Once Oppenheimer isn't showing in this format, you will be watching a fundamentally different end product. Just like Dunkirk isn't the same on your laptop as it would have been in IMAX, or 70mm, or even 35mm.

If the medium didn't matter, cinema wouldn't exist. We would just be reading the scripts for entertainment.

Marshall McLuhan was wrong on a lot of things; but, he was partly right when he said the the medium is the message.