Science & Tech Quote by Matthew Modine

Modine is doing something actors do when they want to sound practical rather than precious: he’s lowering the temperature around a medium-war and treating digital not as a moral upgrade, but as a tool with a personality. The key phrase is “raw stories.” He’s not praising pixels in the abstract; he’s praising what digital lets a filmmaker chase - immediacy, grit, the sense that a scene was caught rather than composed. By invoking Collateral, he picks a famously nocturnal, hyper-modern movie where Los Angeles feels less like a postcard and more like surveillance footage with a pulse. That’s not accidental. Mann’s early high-definition look made the city’s darkness readable, metallic, eerily present. Digital didn’t just record the story; it became part of the story’s nervous system.

The subtext is an argument about taste disguised as craft. Modine is pushing back on the cinephile reflex that film equals “cinema” and digital equals “content.” His “certain kinds of stories” line is a polite way of saying: stop acting like one format is inherently superior. A “raw” narrative - crime, speed, moral abrasion, urban loneliness - benefits from an image that feels less lacquered, less historically “movie-like.” Digital’s sharpness and low-light flexibility can make performances feel more exposed, less protected by the romance of celluloid.

Contextually, this reads like an actor aligning himself with directors who treat technology as an expressive choice, not a brand identity. It’s also a small defense of modernity: the world looks harsher now, so the camera can, too.