Tarantino mourns death of reel life

"Cinema, as I knew it, is dead," said award-winning director Quentin Tarantino, who lambasted the digital generation as "hopeless".

Tarantino, the director of Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, said the prevalence of digital projection in cinemas today meant films were just "television in public".

Arguing that the quality of film-making is in danger of being lost, he said the end of films being presented in 35mm had seen a drop in quality and he hoped future audiences would be "smarter".

Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, where he hosted a special screening of Sergio Leone's 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars, Tarantino implored film fans to demand the "real thing".

"As far as I'm concerned, digital projection is the death of cinema," he said.

"It's not even about shooting your film on film or in digital. The fact that most films aren't even presented in 35mm means that the war is lost."