I used to watch a lot of trailers. Of course, you were forced to watch them when you went to the cinema. Unless you came late, and once upon a time, you didn’t buy a numbered seat, you bought a ticket and CHOSE a seat, so you didn’t come late. But it was okay to watch trailers, actually, because in times of yore they were actually more like teasers. They gave you an idea of what the movie was going to be like. It was very useful for a wimp like me, because I’d usually get an idea about how creepy any movie would be. Film festivals – and I went to a lot of them – were a lot riskier than normal screenings in that regard, and they don’t even show trailers before the feature. A double whammy.

But gone are those days. I haven’t done any research on it, but trailers HAVE become longer. They feel like an AI editing program went over the entire film and cut out the silent bits. They literally laugh at the word “spoiler”, and they do that for what feels like ten minutes. Watch the trailer of any given standard Hollywood film today, and you’ll really think twice before you spend money on a movie ticket, because what else is there that’s going to surprise you?

I also never really watched interviews. On the one hand that had to do with some of the best advice I ever got about art, a slightly changed quote from D.H. Lawrence: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.” And on the other hand, I truly didn’t care about the actors and the directors. I cared about the stories they told and the characters they made. I never really saw them as real people, I guess. Perhaps I lack imagination, but the likelihood of going out for burgers with a movie star seemed pretty low, so why would I have wanted to know what Meryl Streep likes on her sandwich? Although I did once have dinner with George Cosmatos (“Rambo, First Blood: Part II”, in case you are wondering …).

Gone are those days as well.

Because while trailers give away the entire film today, their stars don’t talk about the film at all. Instead of getting a glimpse into the creative process, I now know whether Pedro Pascal prefers boxers or briefs, and that Dakota Johnson got whiplash from filming “Fifty Shades of Grey”.

I once suffered a serious case of Fremdschämen (feeling ashamed for someone else who has done a most embarrassing thing) when a woman offered George Clooney a personal tour of Berlin, plus some sort of liqueur, at the Berlinale press conference for “Syriana”. Now, journalists have no problem presenting the film stars they are interviewing with their movie scrapbook, or giving them sweets, stuffy toys, jeans jackets, and silly hats. Silly hats? Well, of course – the journalist had a birthday, so there had to be silly hats …

It started with subjecting actors to “how well do you know each other”-questions, and now we’re at Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman baking a pizza, or Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby cooking with Gordon Ramsay. What movie were they in exactly? I forgot. “Four Fantastic Roses” or something like that … And if they are not cooking or playing party games, they talk about how good friends they are, and how much they love each other, really, like family. And who gets grumpy on set faster. Things that used to be the prerogative of chat shows are now part of film journalism are now part of PR and promotion. Red carpets look like fashion shows and actors are featured on fashion show catwalks. It’s a very blurred line.

I don’t mind, in a way. Because I can watch all that and still go to a movie that I know very little about.

But then, no, I do mind, actually. Because I find it almost disturbing to see that all this human interest looks very much like a panicked insistence on the fact that we have REAL actors, REAL people, flesh and blood individuals who steal salami from a buffet and break out into REAL sweat as they eat chicken wings with hot sauces called “Da Bomb” or something like that while being interviewed. All these activities scream “these are real human beings”. And even when characters are buried under massive use of CGI, production companies make very sure that we get many – many – images of, say, Ebon Moss-Bachrach in his motion capture suit, so that we know for sure it’s a real human underneath it all.

It’s very hard not to see this as Hollywood holding on for dear life to the belief that it’s still, for now, human. Is it a last stance? A last hurrah before all we get is characters prompted by an assembly line of underpaid ex-directors who now sit in front of a screen instead of standing behind a camera? Let’s hope not.