Guillermo del Toro on the Value of Film

In the most recent Hollywood Reporter Director's Roundtable, Guillermo del Toro, director of best picture nominee "The Shape of Water", articulates so perfectly what so many of us movie lovers have been trying to say about the TV/film divide for ages. That while we most certainly are in a golden age of television, this does not negate what quality filmmaking does. And that what it does is something television cannot and does not do. I'll turn it over to Guillermo:

It's a medium that is not discussed in the way I remember discussing in terms of ... it's the one generator of mythological images we have. Because long arc TV is fantastic, but it does not generate those images -- that have the heft and the weight and the authority that cinema generates.

I am the biggest fan of The Sopranos or Deadwood or ... you name it; characters and arch, as close to literature as you can get, but I cannot hold more than two images. [Yet] I can define the composition, the exact lensing and positions of Kubrick, of Ophuls, of Visconti time and time again.