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DGA QUARTERLY 99 Temporary Trend or Future Forecast? ESPITE the bitter turbulence these fi lms embody—our times have been reasonably described as "cold civil war"—more people of color are taking the director's chair. Filmmakers like Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen and Ryan Coogler have gone from arthouse suc- cess into the mainstream without com- promising the qualities that made them stand out in the fi rst place. Coogler's Black Panther (2018) stands as the highest-grossing fi lm ever directed by an African-American. "I'm very happy about that," says Lee. "I think Black Panther is groundbreaking." Yet he is wary about the current progress. "I'm encouraged," he says, "but I'm not turning somersaults." Lee says he's seen it before, as far back as the '70s. "Some fi lms are made. Everybody's saying how Hollywood has rediscovered black fi lm- makers—then there's another 10-year drought. "I don't care what your politics are, but it's just good business sense to have your work- force refl ect the diversity of the world we live in." ® D creatives—a double-edged sword. "The televisions themselves have tremen- dous potential to present our work well and correctly," says Nolan. "But, of course, the power of those devices means that they can also misinterpret your work. And motion smoothing is one area in which the television manufacturers seem genuinely pretty un- aware of how frustrated fi lmmakers are. "This goes back to [when] many of the conversations were between studios and broadcasters," Nolan adds. "Paul (Thomas Anderson) and I realized that we now need to involve television manufacturers. For exam- ple, with high dynamic range, in the timing suite you are in a way suppressing some of the range so that when the television expands it, it looks correct. So it's a complicated process." Asked whether public awareness is an im- portant aspect of the e ort, Nolan says, "It's a component, but by dealing with the manu- facturers directly, we're hoping to avoid put- ting that burden on the consumer. Even with public awareness, changing settings can be very complicated. The long-term goal is for television sets to be essentially automatically displaying the work correctly." Nolan suggests that when it comes to the TV manufacturers, showing support is just as important as crying foul. "Looking to the future, I think there's going to be a point where we're going to want to involve DGA members with talking about whatever positive changes we've been able to intro- duce with the manufacturers—something the DGA members can get behind and be excited about rather than us just having to complain," he says. "We want to get to a place where we can actually go out there and say that we feel great about the way this stu looks. Because the truth is, if you see a well-aligned HDR image, it looks spec- tacular—the best version of the home video experience that we've had. And we want to maximize that potential." ® CONTINUED FROM PAGE 52