The year is 2022 and the film industry is slowly but surely recovering from the restricting pandemic. Sets and crews are allowed to return to their large-scale norms, cinemas are allowed to be full and Tom Cruise goes viral for shouting at crew members for not following Covid safety regulations on the set of Mission Impossible 7. The big directors of Hollywood who were once young and wild are now at the later half of middle age, further aged by the disruption of a pandemic that made them confront their fragility, their mortality and their relevance.