At a panel at the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival, Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO, David Zaslav, discussed the significance in saving films vulnerable to decaying.

Zaslav said he made efforts in preserving old movies because it is the history of “our country.” He talked about how movies taught people in New York what it was like to be on a farm and vice versa, the stories of America and the world.

When asked how they decide which films to preserve, Spielberg talked about the board Martin Scorcese made in 1990. Scorcese had discovered that in half of the silent films ever made the nitrate it was printed on had completely deteriorated, so he launched a rescue operation alongside many filmmakers, including Spielberg, to convince studios to help finance rescuing films. They’ve restored about 997 films since 1990.

“Early on the decision was made,” Spielberg said, “to restore films that we thought united a director, collected the body of work of that filmmaker, so nothing would be lost. And then we started to make decisions based on the quality of the negative, what was still survivable.”

“We try to find the films, not the films that are our favorite movies, but films that tell a very unique story of this country and the people of this country. And not only this country, but we’re rescuing experimental films, documentaries. We’re rescuing international films now. We’ve already rescued 97 international films. So this is something that’s not going to stop. We were all very busy making our movies in 1990, and Marty put everything aside and said, ‘No, we’re prioritizing this. This is what needs to be done.’”

As for Anderson, he wished to preserve the memories attached to the films as well:

“Sometimes it goes even beyond the history of the business,” Anderson said at the panel, “…I don’t want to get philosophical but it starts to end up being the protection of memories… ‘Where was I when I saw ET?’ I remember it very well… and I remember who I took to see that film as much as I remember the film… yes, it’s the preservation of our work, but it’s also preserving our memories, helping us to preserve those memories so that when you want to revisit that moment or that feeling of when you walked into a theater, you can.”

Watch the full panel at TCM Fest below: