The making of a film? It’s just like a marriage, a matter of understanding and comprehension. Understanding the world changes, push by technology and its development and spreading. Just as the way we enjoy movies and films changes. Despite all changes in technology, experiences like that in Piazza Grande, Locarno, are still of a unique kind.
David Linde might as well be defined as a pioneer, an explorer in the world of cinema. A past as a great producer behind him – in his palmarés, many blockbusters, and many great directors have worked with him – a future of explorer in the new ways to watch a movie following the development and the spreading of technologies, more and more open, more personal, more integrate. From the stage of Spazio Cinema, he talks and tells the very many people who challenged the bad weather to listen to his vision of cinema. Starting with what it means, to him, produce a film.
“It’s just like a marriage. Maybe a business marriage, yet a marriage. Producer, director, actors, they have to understand each other: like between husband and wife”. And if cannot understand each other, the marriage shall not take place. Of course.
David Linde has always been fond of studying, comprehending, understanding. Expecially what would happen out of the US, his home country. “It’s a matter of education received within a family”, he tells. An education based on languages, on knowing different cultures, making different experiences, that has transferred itself on his way to take on life and his work of film producer. The relationship with the audience, for instance.
“The audience is changing. And it will even more in the next few years. It will change in geography, with the Asian countries, India and China first of all but also the South-East of the continent, that become the great silos of audience. We’re talking of some five billion people who will have access to the product-cinema. The way we will enjoy this product is changing, too”.
Right, technological developments bring along great changes. No more cinemas and movie-theatre, neither television.
“There are all the mobile devices, smartphones, ipads, tablets, and more to come, with which you can download and watch a film, a doc, with no limit of space and time. There are videogames, more and more similar to films, more and more looking real. To a producer, that means having to find the key to integrate all this”.
The growth of individual technology shall not let us believe traditional cinema is dead or in a deep coma, an agony. The other way around, “watching a movie in a place like Piazza Grande, Locarno, with thousands of more people, is an experience unique of its kind”. Because technological development can be allowing, for example, to enjoy a movie, a film, in an open air situation, wearing a football-like helmet with headset integrated in it, free of external noise yet able to chat with the persons next to you. Popcorn and helmet: the future of open air cinemas might be like that. Making forecast, though, is a difficult art, almost impossible.
Five years ago they would say cinema could have no market in China: too strong the influence of piracy. Today, after five years only, China is developing so much it will soon count for some 30 per cent of the distribution market”. What lies ahead for us in the future, then, the future only will tell us.
Reporting The World Over 