since the late 1880s
visual artists and storytellers
have used moving images to create amazing works
movies have inspired us
thrilled us and captured our imaginations
film, has helped us to share our experiences and dreams
photochemical film has been the exclusive format
used to capture, develop, project and store moving images
for over 100 years
it is only resently that a new technology had emerged
that is challenging film's place
as the gold standard for quality and workflow
digital technology is evolving to a point that
may very well replace film as the prirary means
of creating and sharing motion pictures
the documentary we're doing is called
it's a documentary about the science, art and impact of digital cinema
100 years of photochemical filmmaking
right now has reached a kind of threshold of tipping point
in this conversaton, in this intersection of time
it's historic
we've kind of come to this place where
is it the end of film?
where are we today?
it's exciting, because it's a reinvention of a new medium
if the photochemical process has virtues through our culture
why aren't you another level
how do you use it to tell a story
how do you use it to paint apicture
are you done with film?
don't hold me to it, Keanu
but...
I think I am
digital cameras are the new aesthetic that coming to cinema
and at the same time we are going to mourn the loss of film
I am constantly asked to justify why
I want to shoot a film on film
But I don't hear anybody being asked to justify
why they want to shoot a film digitally
I want whatever I could imagine to be something we can realize
I saw the door opening on a field of possibilities
that you just couldn't do with film.
It's really sad right now
to see cameras recording imagery in an inferior way
starting to take over film
I'm not gonna trade my oil paints for a set of crayons
there will be people who will cheapen digital
there will be people who will not only kill
the goose that laid the golden egg
they'll sodomize it first
if the intention is that digital is gonna replace film
I would be sad if it didn't acturally exactly replicate it
they process digital now to make it look like film
as if film is inherently better
just we like the way it looks better,
which seems kind of arbitrary.
it's just what we're used to.
film is a 19th century invention
we are at the top of photochemical process
this is about as far as it's ever gonna go
digital is here now
but it's gonna keep going
and you're gonna be a part of that
who's be gonna be a part of that, dictating where that goes
I don't think film's going anywhere
I don't think it's to the advantage of anybody to totally eliminate film
there gonna be many of us, they are gonna fight for film
they are gonna fight for the experience of shooting on emulsion
we really are in the mist of some sort of revolution
that threatens the status quo
this is potentially either scary thing or very liberating thing
one of the first steps in the production process
is capturing the images in camera
the director, actors, cinematographer and the entire production team
work together to bring the script to life
the cinematographer, also called the director of photography or DP
helps the director achieve the look of the movie
the DP is responsible for knowing what equipment is needed
and how it works in order to capture the scenes
a director of photography looks at color and composition
and angles and all those things in terms of how the movie is being built
the quality of light of skin, the quality of light through hair,
the quality of light through the window and bouncing off the floor
they're equating the building of this world
in terms of energy
that reflects off of objects
the question is about
framing, sensibility, how to make people feel
bringing emotion into the light
comes from being appropriate and somehow being
the really great ones are more than appropriate
they really startle you with how wonderfully
evocative this look is of whatever they're doing
that level of craftsmanship or that technical expertise
You can't explain what you're gonna do
so there is a certain amount of leap of faith
that they have to have in you
to be a cinematographer
is to have the knowledge of the art
without any doubt,
cinema today is a mixing of art and technology
today, in this area,
you also have to be a bit of a technician
You have to know the equipment
It's really important for DP to
understand the entire link of the image chain
from acquisition to exhibition
the camera is a tool that focuses and measures
Photons of light and record them in images
With a film camera
Light enter through the lens and
hits the frame of film behind the lens
the film is covered emulsion that
contains grains of silver halide crystals
these crystals react chemically when light hits them
and the crystal change to silver metal
when they are developed
a photographic image is formed on the film
there is something about the
texture of the grain structure of film
that I've...personally I hold onto
and it's like a comforting thing to me
and it feels more tangible
the halides open up and flip themselves
and give sort of textural quality
you still have some granularity in the image that
keeps highlights living
and keeps blacks with
a little bit more nuance and character in them
I like grit and grain and texture
it gives you a variety of different opportunities
the work flow on the film set
basically means that you take thousand-foot load of film
loaded in to the magazines
and that enables you to shoot for roughly 10+ minutes per roll of film
and it gives a natural break in the action
while someone pulls the magazine off the camera
and puts a new magazine on
then the film goes away to the film lab
and is developed overnight
and printed
and then the next day, you get to see dailies
there was a joy for many many years
for us to be the genies on set
that's why we love dailies
We'd all go, we'd act, we'd light
We'd do what we do, and we'd love what we did
and then everybody would wrap,
and the next morning, it'd come back from the lab
and we went "wow, look what we got."
You know, it was magic
the director of photography was a magician
he was the only one who actually, probably knew
what was gonna be on the screen next day.
and this gives you a lot of authority and power
and there's a certain leap of faith that you take when you shoot film
and there's something really romantic about that
getting your dailies back
and everyone being really excited to see what you got
I don't like the betrayal of dailies
I don't like going in and seeing and
getting swept up with the performance
and then seeing it go out focus on a 25-foot screen
and knowing that there's no way to retrieve that
what I didn't like about film was that feeling
midway to the day, end of the day
did we get anything today?
I don't even remember, did we get...
it didn't feel we put the flag in it cause you couldn't see
it's like painting with the lights off
But the DP will tell you:
it's not, the lights aren't off, it's in my head
it's in his head, well, that's great
but I'm operating the camera
I'm picking the lenses, I'm judging the performances
a digital camera does not use film
instead, it has an electronic sensor or chip, behind the lens.
the sensor, is made up of millions of tiny picture elements
or pixels for short
when light enters the camera
it hits the pixels and creates individual electronic charges
these charges are measured and converted into
digital data that represent the image.
grains of film, they're just constantly moving,
so the result is a kind of fuzziness
whereas with the pixel count,
it's a very finite, accurate, exact thing
with digital cameras and monitors
you are able to see exactly what
you are recording on set as you're shooting
unlike film cameras
you don't have to wait a day to see what you've captured
they're no longer dailies
they are "immediatelies"
You sit round back of the set or in the tent somewhere
looking at this huge monitor
and making adjustments from that
which I actually quite like
because it means you're seeing the picture exactly as it is.
and with old film capture
it was overnight, and sometime you'd go to bed and think,
"I wonder if I got that right" you know?
or you'd say, "l think we need more backlight,"
and he'd say "don't worry. it'll look great in dailies."
they know as well as anybody that you go to dailies and say
"I really think there should be more backlight in there."
but If you do it on the set
you can just stand there and say,
"no, more backlight."
and they do it, and I'd say,
"okay, now that's exactly the way I want it
cause that's exactly the way
it's gonna be in the movie theater."
People speak about:
thank god, I can see what I'm getting now
I don't have to wait until tomorrow
I can see if it's in focus. I know what I'm getting
if you're watching a monitor on set
and you feel that you're really seeing what you've got
i think you're fooling yourself
the audience is gonna watch the film
on a screen that is a thousand times bigger than that
you're watching it on a large TV
Yes, you see what you're getting, it's right there
the problem for me that
I think you need to see rushes later
I think in order to concentrate
with the performances or just the movement
that's I still think
you need to see them at a special time
the process of shooting film was
the DP's art and secret
today the cinematographer is monitored on the digital shoot
and everything that they're doing can be seen,
criticized and questioned
It's very destructive sometimes
I've worked with a couple of actors
that insist on looking at it everyday take.
with one of the actors, I was able to talk him out of it
because it's making his performances very self-conscious
Right?
I also am convinced that everybody is just looking at their hair.
One of the great pleasures of being a cameraman was
that the people ...the suits and the producers
they all think they know how to act
they all think they know how to write
they all think they know how to direct
but they knew they didn't knew how to shoot
so if they really got on you
you could say: here, here's the meter, you do it.
and that would shut them up.
but now,
they're beginning to think that they can shoot.
it's not like it used to be
there're cinematographers who became cinematographers
because they love the voodoo of it
they love it when the director says to them:
"all rlght, down in that cornor
are we gonna be able to see that? or is that gonna kind of melt away?"
and they'd get to go: " just wait until tomorrow,
it's gonna be amazing, you're gonna love it."
and I've had those experiences,
l've sat in dailies and I've gone "oh."
some of darius khondjl's work on
you just go, "wow"
but there is the an equal amount of time you'd go:
I would look at it and say: "what the fuck?"
Now with digital cameras
everyone could see exactly what
things were going to look like
that changes the way you light it
it may even change your performance
because it creates a different feeling in the whole thing
It gives us more scope to be creative
that's what's exciting
that's to me was what the digital revolution
in cameras is all about
In 1969, at bell labs in New Jersey
George Smith and Willard Boyle
came up with the idea for the charged coupled device
and the first CCD chip was created
One of the things that makes the CCD unique
is its ability to perform specialized functions
such as acting as a camera
the image that you see on the TV screen of both of us
is being produced by the small CCD camera
which is directly in front of us here
In the early 1970s, after a visit to bell labs
SONY started investing in and developing products
using the CCD technology
Akio Morita was the founder of SONY
He was always enamored with Hollywood
and it was his dream to design an electronic camera
that could create images that were equivalent
if not better than the 35mm film
record what you want , when you want and watch...
by the mid-1980s
SONY was producing its first consumer-quality CCD camcorders
In the 1990s
small standard-definition cameras began recording digitally
they were first to use cinematically
when they were embraced by the
dogma 95 movement out of Denmark
Can you speak a little bit about
Where did you first coming to digital...
actually by chance
Because we made this thing called dogma 95
and we made some rules
and one of them was that
the thing has to be filmed in academy 35mm
and then one of them said
it had to be hand-held camera also
and then I said, but if that is the case
we can also use video
and that was just at the same time as these cameras kind of appear
Anthony Dod Mantle was the DP
who shot the first dogma film
Thomas Winterberg's
well, was the appeal also of digital video
the lightness of the camera, the way that you could move it...
I'll tell you where that first hit me.
I was coming home from a foot match in Copenhagen
I had a SONY PC 3 which actually was the camera
I ended up shooting on
and I remember seeing this crowd of, like,
supporters just moving across this field
with an industrial backdrop
it was misty and hazy, it was kind of gothic
I was just learning how to play with it,
and I just whipped it around and
I got this weird moment of immediacy
of lightness and immediacy
and I looked at the image and I thought "my god"
the amazing thing about this camara is
I caught that.
two months later,
l was shooting on these small cameras
Casuse I want to be a protagonist in
the combination of the movement and activity and emotion
emotional movement of that camera
which would probably define that film's visual language,
apart from the actors
and the writing and the great script
with that camera I suddenly saw these moves,
these possible movements I didn't know in my cinema
and that became my donation to
What meant
and what a lot of the other films of that area meant?
was that you just have to completely rethink
the technical side of filmmaking
it brought people to filmmaking for creativity's sake.
it pointed out that the mechanism
of filmmaking only serves the creative.
With DV
came this whole idea of,
"wait a second"
if we lower our budgets
we get more freedom as directors and producers
shooting a film on video
at that point meant it was crap
It was almost an accepted truth
that you didn't shoot films
that you're serious about on any kind of video format
We just started going out there and we were saying:
Look, we're gonna make movies digitally
we're gonna give directors final cut
total creative control
but we'll make them cheaper
and our very first movie was
Hey Buck
uh, Hi
can I get you something to drink?
oh, no, that's alright
Looking at rushes it was scary as hell
would you like some icecream?
really? uh, I like icecream
we were, like, "my god, it looks so amateurish
a lot of people actually...
commented on how muddled it looked
l think we're fuckin' doomed, man
I remember when we were presenting it at Sundance
they were scared to death
that the rection would be "this was shot on video"
the digital presentation did not look nearly
in any way, like an acceptable substitute of what film was
because of...porn
and because of documentary
and because of news footage
video occupied a space in your mind where you're kind of like
"I'm here. I'm in that room with them.
oh my god, is this really happening?"
and that makes better
people were starting to think
in a completely different way about
how could the technology and medium
help us to rethink filmmaking?
You started to see people start to challenge the idea
as did the group known as
InDigEnt (Independent Digital Entertainment)
they were creating standard-def video
that would then be converted to film
for theatrical release.
I think as an independent filmmaker
we are in the most exciting time ever
because now we can go out and make a film on DV
Oscar has a new girlfriend
really?
it seems last evening,
he had quite the late-night conversation
the idea was that if you shoot digitally it's cheap
and it absolutely helped
fuel the number of films that got made
l remember, though, my first year at Sundance
we had 225 submissions total of the fiction category
a few years later, it was 10 times of that
back to, like, the Sundance days or
the releases of InDigEnt,
people were saying that's ok for you it's independent
but this isn't cinema this isn't...
that was a huge thing to make film
on a video camera and go to Sundance
and win best director, and win best film
for
Gary's own film
ended up being sold for enormous amount of money
and everyone that worked on it made money from that sale
and that's when a lot of the idea of
"wait a second, you can shoot films digitally
and it's almost like a production aesthetic
and that's when all those debates started
I mean, you must have heard in the late '90s
"film is the gold standard."
and the tools that you're playing with are what?
debasing, threatening
I have been slapped around if you wanna...
What do you mean "slapped around"?
I mean I've been applauded and almost executed
for the same sentence
It was quite obvious to me to go to digital because of
the material you could have in the camera
the amount of the material
you can have your camera was obvious
since I was trying to create another way
of working with actors
and that was essential
I imagine there was,
like a liberation for you, then
in terms of the relationship with your actors, longer takes?
Yes, Keanu
10-minute was maximum, it wasn't even really 10
it's nine-something,
When that thing starts rolling
there's kina underlying feeling
that it's precious stuff rolling through there
and it puts a kind of a tension on things
I could shoot as much as I wanted
I can get the best performances
I didn't have to worry about
shooting these little bursts of film
that was ridiculous but that was what I had to do.
that's how expensive it was comparatively
Digital, a little gizmo, 40 minutes
and you can be running this camera
and talking to the actor
Starting over again
and they get down in there
and they catch a thing that never would get caught
if you had that giant thing there
I love to run the camera
especially when we're in an emotional place
and magic is happening
When you go "cut", that all of a sudden,
everybody gets in there
and you were at a place where it is just there
and then everything stops
and it's like "ok, now go back to that"
now it's like "no,
just run the camera, back to one"
as fast as you can get back to your position
You can go again
I've just always felt there was way too much waiting
because movies for me there is always momentum problem
cause I grow up in the theater
and that's how I was trained
and a lot of times in movies I...
feel like "can we go?"
it's very tough for me to say that I need to
be able to shoot 45 minutes or something
not reload the cameras
because the truth is, the entire group can only concentrate for so long
the actors can only concentrate for so long and
then you need 2-min-break, 3-min-break
during which time you reload
When you're running a film camera on set
everyone seems to take things a little bit more seriously
When they hear the film running
they hear the money running through the camera basically
Everybody brings "A" game
the first time I'd ever heard the whir of film going through a camera
It was thrilling also make me very nervous because
all of a sudden, each take counted in a way that
I never really experienced before
what about that moment after you say "action"
Like for me, when that camera's rolling
I guess maybe it's connected to the money but...
the 10-minute reel is so finite
It's almost an athletic thing like "focus, focus...uh"
Like that's good for the
that's just atmosphere, though
I mean, if you want that
you can create that, right?
I thought it could make a difference to actors
I don't think it does particularly to actors
I think actors just infinitely adjust to
whatever way they have to tell it, they'll tell it
they didn't ask for a break?
they didn't say:"hey, can we stop?"
-You are on digital now? -Yeah
but my first experience with that was just, there was no cut
I worked with Richard Linklater
on the film called
It was just like...you can just go on
Yeah, I was just like "can we please stop"
Stop
No, we don't have to
but I want to!
Robert Downey actually came up to me, and he said:
"I can't work like this,
I never get to go to my trailer,
I never get my shit together
I'm on my feet 14 hours a day,
I'm shooting all the time."
He actually left mason jars of urine on the set
Just like over in the corner stuff
just he would go off and pee and he bring it back
this was like his form of protest
I'd previously work on celluloid only,
really ,and been thrilled
to arrive at the holy grail of celluloid, it's amazing
so I made the first few films on celluloid
and I made a very big Hollywood film
with Leonardo Di Caprio,
and a big crew
and it didn't suit me at all
I felt it was too much away from me really,
somehow and so I then saw
wasn't so much the film, wasn't even the look
It was the camera operating
that movement of the camera
So I got in touch with the guy who shot it,
Anthony Dod Mantle
and I said, "I feel like I'm not doing
the right thing any more
"Can we do something together, Digitally"
which I didn't know what I was saying by saying that.
it was kind of like
a new word. in a way
then we came with the script <28 days later>
and we shot it on consumer cameras
But I remember anthony saying to me
"It's all vey well working in this format,
you know," he said, "I'll never get an Oscar"
there was a sequence in it in the beginning
where the character Cillian Murphy wanders round
a deserted London
and we would not have been able to achieve the film on film
because we had to stop the traffic.
We didn't have the money to do it
so what we would do is, we'd just hold the traffic briefly
but because we were on these cameras,
we could use ten of them
cause it's so cheap
and he could walk through central London -an area of it
and we had 10 cameras on it.
So you'd only have to stop the traffic for a few minutes
then you would actually have 10 shots
that was an enormous advantage
well I placed cameras around
Not coinciding not badly not loosely
I try to control every angle
and I know roughly where it's best
when it's gonna be used.
but that said you can let it run a bit,
and because it's digital,
you get something.
if you were in a wide shot with a small figure in it
they were just like 2-3 pixels
I mean there was nothlng there, there was just the color
quality-wise, if you put it
up against an exact copy of it on film
the film will be immeasurably superior
but you can shoot illegally,
surreptitiously without people knowing
You could do unconventional things
and the rhythm of film,
which has been passed on since it began
and crews have learned
you interrupted that, I love that freedom
and I got taste for it then,
and I knew once we'd shot that sequence
that I was gonna work on it now,
that was I wanted to work on
It makes the editor's job extraordinary
cause they're often plowing through
masses and masses and masses of material
In the 1970s and 80s
electronics companies began working on
solutions to replace film editing
for over 100 years, editing meant
physically cutting and connecting pieces of film
when you used to go to an editing room
they brought in the trim basket
they took the film out,
and they looked at it through the moviola
and then you slapped it together like this
you remember, the white gloves and
they're incredibly fast at it
I'd find a frame I'd...
sometimes splicing to the point of,
getting your fingertips bloodied
you know, that's just really the blood in the film
So, I mean you really had it,
and now it's pressing little buttons
now this is the floppy disk we're all familiar...
early editing systems used multiple magnetic disks
tape machines and laser disks
to store and read digitized film
most of these systems were enormous and very costly
the first thing that happened, really, that changed
everything, I think, was the digital editing machine,
which meant our dailies had to be
converted from film into tape
so that started the whole thing going
we started a picture editing system that was all digital
we had the first
"editdroid" working in 1980
and we eventually sold the system to Avid
by the late 1980s
Avid had developed digital editing into a compact,
cost-effective computer-based system
when I first saw the Avid as a demo
the image quality was blocky and tiny
and I said: this is gonna be really good when they get
the image quality right in about 5 year's time
why not try it on the Avid?
and, you know, I'm also one of those early adopter people
I like to leap into the unknown
I remember on
I suddenly really looked at the image and said
"oh, no, how am I gonna to be able to do this?"
when I'd work with older editors
they'll often to talk about the time
when computers were starting to come in
and they were very resistant to it because
they weren't familiar with computers
they were just scared that they didn't know enough about it
if you push this button or if you accidentally
turned it off wrong or turned it on wrong
that everything would be gone
whereas that could never happen
if you actually physically had the film in your hand
they thought "that's not editing,
editing is..."
so when you're editing the movie on film
that's just technology, the art form
is the manipulation of images to tell a story
it was extremely difficult for me to learn
because I han't used a computer
I thought a mouse was somthing that ran across the floor.
I mean, I was that ignorant.
but I learned, and I kicked the machine quite a bit
but once I'd got going on it, I was ok, and I liked it
there's no film in the editing bay
it's all...a kind of...
it's drives, and it's quite
you know, I don't hear...
I used to hear the "rururu..."
the reels on the benches
it was a very noisy, kind of bustling atmosphere,
and now it's very quite. it's almost like,
I can burn incense and light candles
digital brings you speed, and it almost
challenges you in the sense of,
"can I think that fast?"
"do I need time to breathe?"
sometimes these young editors,
who are very interesting and doing
extremely interesting work
but they don't always have the time to sit,
just sit back and think about what they're doing
and I think if they work on film
they have probably trained their minds
to do that a little bit more.
so it's a different way of thinking, really.
film taught you a discipline
that is gone a little bit from the computer
because once you put the scissors in,
you've then got to join it back together with sticky tape
and it bumps through the machine,
so you were much more decisive about it.
has editing gotten better?
because there's infinite choice? I'm not so sure
in fact, I'm pretty sure
there's a lot of movies that have gotten worse
because you manipulate it to death
we may have lost something
the cut in
when he blows the match out
it is recognized that you have a funny sense of fun
well, that was a dissolve in the script
and if you'd been on digital as we are today,
we would have only ever seen it as a dissolve.
in those days, the film was butted together like that,
just with the direct cut
and so, when we saw it, we thought "wow, that's fantastic"
it just worked, it just was magic,
when you feel that feeling.
digital is this unbelievably
malleable plastic of imagery and sound,
and that's seductive, because that's what we do,
we are sculptors of images and sound
it's not that you can't do it with film
it's just that...it's harder to do that
and make it look good
as digital technology continued to grow
computer-generated images or CGI
were appearing more and more in movies
visual effects or VFX
have been part of filmmaking since the earliest years
camera tricks, lighting techniques,
elaborate models and lab processes
have all been used to alter reality and
enhance the moviegoing experience
on many films, there are a number of things
that are depicted that you can't just go out and shoot
so the images you need to see you need
to be manufactured in some way
being visual effects supervisor calls on you to understand
a huge variety of different aspects of the world
around us at any one time
you've also got to understand the physics of the way
that light reacts of different surfaces
you've got to understand animation, you've got to understand
the way people move, creatures move.
you have to be an artist and a technician at the same time
and that's an interesting combination
originally when effects were done,
or for the flrst hundred years that effects were done
they were done, you know, with models and with film cameras
and they are very sort of limited, what they can do
but a lot of time and energy...
and people put a lot of work into being able
to make films
when I started doing this about 22 years ago,
the environment I learned in was
a physical one, it was a stage
miniatures, cameras,
lights and everything in it
the great thing about making real stuff is
you get to use all of your senses
and your physical perceptions and
to stand there with 3 other people and critique a model
or talk about how cool something
looks like under real lighting
is pretty satisfying
and all those photography would end up
in an optical printer in the end
that's a large device that actually
compresses layers of film together
and creates new exposures of the film so that
you can combine layers of images
into the final one that you see in the movie.
the visual effects department was literally sandwiching
one piece of film next to another piece of film
and that really introduces a huge amount of degradation.
in 1978, we had just finished
we'd done some digital shots in there
which were very very crude.
you know, the diagram of the death star
and that kind of stuff.
but I knew a lot of guys,
that were working in the digital field,
so I started a computer division
we developed the
Pixar computer for I.L.M.
I'm right now in one of our
three computer rooms we have here at I.L.M.
and what we have here are
thousands and millions of cycles of computering power
going by every single second.
so I kind of pushed the staff...
at least as much as I could... here at I.L.M.
with this graphics group that we had.
the exciting thing about it was,
it didn't feel like there were a lot of rules
it really did seem like, kind of, the wild west.
it starts to become possible to scan in film and
bring in the film into the computer and make changes to
that the massive advantage to digitizing your film
was that you wouldn't get any degradation
once it's digital, those are 1s and 0s
and they just stay as 1s and 0s all the way down the pipe
digital became important from an effects point of view
the first path through the system was
in the effects arena, OK?
it was using digital technology to realize visions.
okay, if you can take a piece of film
you can turn it into numbers,
you can manipulate those numbers and
then put it back onto the film,
boy, there...there's no limit to what you could do.
the entire world is wide open.
the first real image that we did that
was completely digital
was in
we have a character made out of stained glass,
but the glass actually had to look like it was real,
not like a graphic of any sort.
and it took us 6 months to do 7 shots,
which was pretty complicated
but amazing that we got it done in that time.
George was always very progressive about digital,
it was just something about that the effects community
you got comfortable with it really early on
I was just trying to be a sheepdog
ha! enough wolves in the world already
now we are still shooting on film
we weren't shooting with digital cameras yet,
but all of the post processes
were startling to fall into line
how did you go into the computer?
so I would have my hand and
then they would take a picture of it,
and then in a computer,
they would do an animation of, like, a silver hand,
and then they would show you on a movie screen
our experience on the trilogy...
what was really interesting with that you realized
you are really creating these images in post.
you couldn't shoot the image,
you were ,making the image in the computer.
middle to late 90s,
I guess it's standard-def. It sounds like
it's visual effects, kind of, was the way to get in.
we had a program at I.L.M. doing our effects.
we had to convert from film to digital in order to do it
we could save a huge amount of money
just by not having to convert anymore.
film is cumbersome,
so I just said,
"I'm gonna take my money and my time.
I'm gonna fix it."
so when we went to SONY, and we said:
"we would like to help you,
work with you to build a digital camera"
he was bound
and determined that
episode 2 was gonna be shot digitally.
we need to get that all worked out,
and get pipeline figured out
for doing full-on production with the digital cameras.
one of the problems with early digital capture
was resolution.
resolution is dependent on many factors,
but in the most basic terms,
it is the number of pixels a camera can record.
the more pixels you have, the higher the resolution
and more detail an image would have.
a typical standard-definition, or sd, camera
usually had a resolution of about 720 × 480 pixels
really, the turning point was in the year 2000
when we came out with f900 camera,
which was our first high-definition camera.
before that, whatever you were looking at
really looked like video.
high-definition cameras record a resolution of about
1920 pixels across, just under 2K
in 2002
we did
it was the first major feature that was shot high-definition
what George did on movie
was take an experimental HD camera
and apply it to feature film paradigm
that was unthinkable at that time
it meant that he went around the entire film community
but it more deeply meant that he went around film itself
it became a really really polarizing time
for a lot of people in Hollywood
they got up and had a big meetings,
saying that I was the devil incarnate
that I was gonna destroy the industry,
that I was gonna destroy all their jobs,
that this is inferior,
that he says he shot digitally,
but he didn't.
we have the word that he actually used film cameras,
that he's not shooting digital. he's lying to everybody.
when the f900 came out, I thought,
"the images on that are just truly appalling."
I don't think that was a cinematic camera at all
the early years, I didn't feel that digital capture
or digital production was the same
they would always say: "see, you can't tell the difference,"
and I could tell the difference.
we'll be the first to admit that th f900
wasn't designed like a film camera.
of course George Lucas said after he shot
that he wouldn't shoot another film on film again
and that created, quite an uproar in Hollywood
digital technology and digital cameras
looked like a threat to people's existence and
way of thinking and way of working.
filmmaking is an art,
and to the traditional filmmaker it looks like
we were messing around with art.
they would say,
"why are you going backwards?"
but there's a lot to be said about the necessity
to kind of lean back to be able to spring forward.
see, l remember George Lucas pulling together
everybody about 10 years ago
at a conference he gave at the ranch up in San francisco
and when objections arose about the idea that
digital will put an end to the art of cinematography,
he pointed out it's just another tool
and that's true.
when people saw George Lucas's tests
they said: "that's...that's...no, that's not gonna work."
it was that same sort of closed-minded,
"we're gonna wait 10 years to adopt this."
I wasn't gonna wait that long,
I said, "I'm following obi wan",
obi wan knows
what he's talking about.
he knows what time is it. he always does.
I can tell this is gonna be the beginning of something big,
and I want to be there for that.
but the image sucked.
the image wasn't bad, but the image wasn't as good as film
but it allowed me to do something
you could not have done on film.
I picked up my book,
and I went, "I know how to do this now.
my god, if I shoot this digital,
I can make it look just like this book."
the night is hot as hell
I'm staring at a goddess
she's telling me she wants me
would not exist if I had shot that on film
I couldn't have... I wouldn't have even thought to do it
I was able to do things that pushed the art form.
technology pushes the art, and art pushes technology.
when came out, it hit people
like a brick in the head
'cause they had no idea what they were looking at.
instead of hiding from it under a rock
and hoping it goes away,
you ended up doing something that people
then realized was possible.
I was just so amazed... the richness that it had.
I didn't know it was even possible,
but the system's got better for color timing and
for working in that color space.
after the movie is shot, edited, and VFX have been added,
a colorist or color timer at the lab
makes adjustments to the look of the movie.
in the traditional photochemical method
the negative is developed, and a print is made
timing goes back to the days when,
there was only black and white.
these scenes show the dark room operations
of the laboratory in the old days
the guy that had my job,
he used to look at the negative and decide how long
it would have to stay in the bath.
if at first it wasn't right
dunk, dunk again
so, it was time. it was time-related.
with the advent of color film,
the timers became more involved in the creative process
at the lab, the color timer, DP,
and director determined the look
for the final prints that will be seen
by the public in the theaters.
the only adjustment that can be made photochemically
are color balance between red, green, blue and brightness
our job, basically, is to achieve
the vision of the director and the DP
and make it happen on a piece of film
like, I would sit with the director or the DP,
and they would say,
"that looks a little bit too red, too me",or "too blue"
and we would manipulate it in our mind as how much to
change it or to make different cuts balance
with each other
well, the timer on the film,
they got to deal with pretty much from the head,
by the intuition.
yeah
it was hard, it was very hard
so, there was a lot of art and labor involved in it.
these people really work hard to achieve that.
I still found it very, very frustrating, the timing process
that you're kind of talking over the thing
while it's running and trying to keep up with the cuts
and saying, "I don't know. that looked a little
cyan to me" or something,
and the guy is, like, trying to write it down...
write the footage down
as it goes by, and you can't stop and...
that just seemed crazy to me.
digital color correction tools were first used for shorter pieces
such as commercials and music videos.
I used to do tons of music videos
and we came up with some of the craziest and I think,
groundbreaking visual images,
and it was just amazing ability
to come into a room like this
and manipulate something to create images
that people had never seen before
digital color correction began
replacing traditional photochemical methods of color timing.
my job is to be able to make sure that the creatives
get everything that they want
so the cinematographer gets a palette or
the contrast that he wants,
and, of course, the director gets the feeling
that he wants throughout the movie
and make sure that we can see all actors' eyes
and see all of the emotion that he wants us to see.
I can now start building what we call "power windows"
in a power window, I can change any kind of hue I want.
if I just want those trees over on the left,
I can pick the color that I want of those trees
and I can isolate it.
now I can change those trees to any color I want.
the cinematographer and the director come in
and we spend a couple weeks
grading the film and giving it that look,
to make it look beautiful
however they want it to look
I have this great feeling that I can do just about anything
you ask me to do it within reason
who invented this process?
it was the same technology
that people used for music videos
to create all those cool looks
and, basically, what happened is over the last 10 years,
it's just evolved to become a lot more streamlined
was really the first movie
where at basically that every single frame
was a visual effect.
So it was all color timed digitally for the look.
So it was the first DI. It was just kind of...
Roger Deakins is
sitting in the room
and saying
"I can't get what I want in photochemical
because every time I color time this nice golden color,
I lose my blue skies.
what am I gonna do?"
it seems a little bit yellow, doesn't it?
oh, yeah, the trees were a little bit more brown
So he came in and did testing actually,
I got to sit with him and showed him,
Ok, we can key it, what we do is,
we can basically affect everything in the image
except for the blue in the sky."
and also they were wearing overalls, all right,
so the blue's in wardrobe
but everything else, like the green trees
that are not in the palette that you want,
we can desaturate them and make them brown gold."
so out of the necessity of the look for the movie
and then other people kind of catching on, saying
"ooh, I could use that in..."
it just became, more and more popular.
timing is a very frustrating process on photochemical
it's just very crude, it's very...you can hardly to do anything.
that's a whole thing about DI
while I could go in and circle little things
and make a face a little bit redder and,
bring out the background or bring...
I just was in heaven
I said,"this is amazing.
I can do anything to fix this movie."
and what I find interesting now looking back
to the beginning experimentation of a lot of
cinematographers like myself,
going from a film original into the digital world,
seeking more control over the image and
being able to manipulate the image more,
is that now, we actually have less control
because we then give away our negative,
give away our product.
anybody can take it after that and can manipulate it.
the colorist is a really important aspect
of the final product.
I'm the one that's pushing these buttons
to make your film look a certain way.
Yes I'm getting the direction, but
it's a lot of my own intuitiveness
to crank that a certain amount
and to push that into a certain direction.
So I'm kind of like the last person
who really gets to touch it.
It started off being very adversarial between
cinematographers and colorists
because it was like, "oh, well, he shouldn't be determining
what the look of film is, I do that."
the beauty of these projects,
these days is, it's a team.
I think it could take the power away from the DP,
but I think it's
your job as a cinematographer to
try your best to see it through to the end,
and I think they would do everything in their power
to make sure they're present at the DI
and that they supervise that so that there vision that
they originally intended was executed.
on they offered me to do a DI
but because everything was built for us,
what we had on screen was exactly what we wanted.
we didn't have to have a DI to change everything.
what I'm trying always to do with... in camera
and with lighting and with filters and with lenses
But not later in the DI
OK, if you have a special story
where you need to change the reality
then a DI is something wonderful,
because you can do whatever you want within the image,
which can be great, which can be wonderful
once we get done digitally color-correcting your movie,
we make a brand new negative and
then make a print of that negative.
then we look at the print versus the data
in the side-by-side fashion.
and then we dial in the print to match the data
to make the print look exactly the way it should.
How do you feel about... when you do all of this work
and you have it pristine
and you're gonna to have some prints
that are perfect, and then some prints...
I mean, do you have to kind of let it go once you created it?
honestly, the truth of the matter is,
is that when you go to a theater
and you watch that print that you spent weeks of laboring on
every theater looks different.
they have the luminance on their projector at different level
or, there's so many variables
the real auteur, ultimately, of a picture,
if you want to use the word, is the projectionist.
the sound can be loud or low,
you can see the head of the actor or not
'cause he can frame you out, 'cause he;'s busy.
he's got things to do.
you know, a film will come up and one reel will be blue;
another reel will be brown
because of the projector light.
but we got to enjoy that.
I thought it was part of the film.
it's always a huge disappointment now for me
to see a film print.
like, it's depressing.
it's not sharp, it doesn't have any snap.
it's shaking. it's dirty. I hate it.
I put in a tremendous amount of effort
to make my images the way I have them in mind,
and I create them; and I have them
on the finished product in the camera
but what happens afterwards?
the quality of film is terrible in a theater
and anybody in Hollywood, they say,
"Oh, it's not that bad a camera, no, it's not that"
they never go into a theater
to see it in a real theater
played so long in theaters we actually just...
our prints fell apart.
they literally just dropped
out of the projectors in pieces.
so we were struggling to try to
get quality into the theaters,
and out of that came the fact that if it was digital,
you'd have a brilliant thing.
You wouldn't have scratches. you wouldn't have tears.
hype surrounding this movie has been overwhelming.
In 1999, we were able to project
digitally.
We had 2 theaters in New York, 2 theaters in LA
and that was the first time that major Hollywood movie
had been projected digitally.
there were actually four digital projectors in the country
Just four in 99.
By 2002, there were still over 150
the post flow was already there.
it was all digital,
and the rest of the industry was going theres
sound had already gone there, editorial had gone there
the camera was lagging behind,
New companies began to develop high-definition cameras,
and other Hollywood films followed Lucas's lead.
Michael Mann's used the thomson viper
a HD camera that outperformed film
at shooting in dark enviroments
Micheal wanted to see into the night.
and that, at that point was really,
you know, best done with these digital cameras
tweaked up and pushed till we sort of pushed
the boundries of what the digital was capable of.
was interesting in that
it was supposed to look exactly the way it looked.
when you look outside at night, you don't see black night.
you see an aura around the city of
green, magenta, purple lights, and there's this,
like, haze in the sky,
and you just see all these crazy colors.
and the only way to really capture that,
at that time, was digitally.
you've got a lot of sort of
nighttime photography going on now
that's using the different
sensitivitiy of, CCD chips.
they see a little more of the UV spectrum.
so you've got filmmakers trying to use
that to give a different aesthetic to nighttime lighting,
but to me, it's still, at the moment,
retaining that flavor of video.
the viper was the first camera that really told me that
the digital age was ratcheting up in intensity,
and I could see the footrace in cameras coming.
In 2005, Panavision,
an established force in the film camera business,
made a serious push into digital
with a large sensor single-chip camera.
We started looking at this as real format,
and we decided that the best thing we can do is design
what I used to call "a film camera that takes tape"
and that's when we started drawing out the genesis
"Genesis" is a full-frame, 35mm chip
that allows depth of field very similar to film
and we could use all our 35mm lenses
which totaled in the thousands, literally.
and we went to the work... partnered up with SONY on it.
they designed the electronics and we put it together.
and we introduced the first full-frame digital camera
for making feature films.
the "genesis" was hyped to hell because
it was from Panavision,
and it was SONY designing a system for Panavision.
the good about it was, it took Panavision lenses.
It was a 35mm-size sensor,
and of course, the viper had been a small 2/3 inch sensor.
people wanted the same depth of field and
the same look that they got with 35mm,
which, of course, is what you got with the genesis,
and it gave pretty good images.
We were very careful to design it for film crews
so the transition, if there was going to be one...
would be easy for the people making movies.
Dean Semler who was an academy award
winning cinematographer for
Shot down in Mexico
where the tempreture was 100 degrees
and humility was 200,
and never had a second of downtime.
He felt that it was like a film camera.
It's 35 ponds.
the fucking camera is this big,
and on the top of it, it looks like film magazine.
the recorder attached to it
the same way the mag would attach to it...
so on the top or on the back.
if I want to see what just got shot,
does it a play back off that?
they said, "no, you could never touch that.
it's like your original negative."
I said, "let me see if I got this straight,
you guys spent how many millions of dollors
developing a camera with SONY
and I can't play the HD back to look at it,
because that's the 'negative'?"
where we were in 06, 07
we had the color space and we had the the revolution
but we didn't have the dynamic range.
so you had to be careful on the set.
dynamic range is vital
dynamic range is more important than anything to me.
I mean, that's really slows me down when
I'm shoot digitally.
if you have sort of a range
between dark and bright in film like this
shooting digital
you don't have wide range
which film has between the blacks and the lights.
so whatever is up here is cut off,
and whatever down there is also cut off
I just don't feel it has the latitude that
enables me to do what I want to do.
you can't overexpose it by 5 stops and
still have something in the image.
you can't underexpose it by 4 stops and
still have a trace of something in the image.
I think it's fun to play in those areas.
in 2005, Jim Jannard,
the founder and owner of the multi billion dollar
sunglass and sports apparel company, Oakley
set out to create a new cinematic and
affordable digital camera.
digital wasn't paying enough respect to film.
it wasn't as good as film,
and to me, everything in the world
can and will be made better.
the only question is when and by whom.
there was a technological movement
towards the eventual replacement of film.
what was happening from some of the major manufactures is,
they were creating video-level tools, essentially HD tools
and sort of trying to push that into the world of cinema,
and what we saw was that that
wasn't anywhere close to good enough.
we wanted to set a high enough target
so that it was meaningful.
that's the nature of RED.
we want to help send film to the retirement home
and have it feel good about what took its place.
in 2007, the RED 1 was available to the public.
this new generation of digital cameras
could now shoot more resolution than HD
and increase in pixels from about 2k to 4k.
when I saw the RED I really felt
I should call the film on the phone and say
"I've met someone,"
'cause I really thought, "this is the future"
the resolution, the curve,
the way it saw light...
I just felt, "this is a new thing"
and I was insistent that we shoot on it
digital at the beginning was very bad, everybody knew that.
then came the RED camera
which was a little bit better than the previous ones
at least it was cheaper, ok,
it's cheap, but it's not good enough,
and I actually experienced the limitation of that.
well, it had problems. It crashed occasionally,
to put it mildly. it's a computer
but then again, RED ignored everything about
normal film camera bodies
and built what they thought was right.
even with the war stories of being out
the heat and having ice packs on it and all that stuff,
none of that bothered me
because the get was so significant.
in this case, not having to lug film magazines up and down
this revine for days on end in 100-degree weather
and being able to shoot onto a flash card
and change magazines in 15 seconds
that alone was huge for us.
it resulted in a better movie.
I really love what Jim Jannard's doing,
I love what that company's about
and I love the tack they took.
It's very much no-holds-barred,
like "let's roll up our sleeves,
let's get in up to our eyeballs,
and let's figure this shit out."
the RED 1 is 9 pounds and put a lens on it, 14 pounds.
on I went to him and I said,
"I got to shoot these tiny boats."
they're, like, the thickness of potato chips,
and I can't add 13 pounds of camera
out on the side of this.
I'll topple this boat."
he said, "Ok what you want me to do?"
I said, "you got to take one,
you got to bore it out, you got
whatever it is you have to do.
you've got to figure out a way.
you got to give me the IndyCar version of the RED 1"
this was on friday
on Sunday, he called me and he said:
"we'll make the bodies out of carbon fiber."
I said, "when can I have it by?"
he goes, "it's on my desk."
and I went down and I picked up two,
and they were 5 pounds... 5 and a half pounds
that never existed before with film cameras...
this sort of immediate call-and-response
between the people who were shooting and
the people who were creating the cameras
I was desperate to make something that
had all the fresh air in it,
and of course, when you go to India-in Bombay especially
it's got life, it's just coming screaming
at you all the time in every way.
Danny comes with an idea, rage.
he comes with an idea
with speed, energy, youth,
and that's all I need in the script.
and then running, and that's it, and then off we go to India
it's just the most wonderful place to work,
for a different kind film
and we wanted a camera would somehow try and
catch a bit of that.
it's about finding a camera, the task is there, it's clear
my job is then to find,
with all my anarchic and conventional experience,
I've just got to find the tool
cameras like Silicon Imaging's SI-2K
have been able to go places and get shots that
would have been very difficult with film
or earlier versions of HD cameras.
it's a sensor with a computer on the back of it.
so do you make your computer look like a film camera?
or do you say, "oh, to the hell with that,
take this ethernet cable and connect it into a laptop."
and that's what the SI camera was.
at that point, there were no other cameras
in the world is small enough,
and anthony wanted to be able to run in the streets
and track the children as they were running
and be at the same height level as the kids.
so they took macbook pros and put them into a bagpack
to use for their capture and recording system.
film cameras, even when they're off the legs
or off the steadicam
or off the crane,
they're still connected to the cameraman's body
he's either ...well,
he's either chasing you down the street
or he's got it here, or they turn it round
and he runs backwards and things like that.
with this SI-2K you could do that.
it was no longer connected to the cameraman's body.
he could do different things with it during the scene,
literally just improvising
in 2009,
won the academy award for best cinematography.
it was the first time the award was given to
a movie shot almost entirely on digital cameras.
so you're at the academy awards.
do you feel like that the film...
did that film make digital be acceptable in the mainstream now?
the success of with critics and with the audience
symbolizes something of an epoch.
it perhaps puts...
hammers the stake a little bit further into the ground
as far as acceptance of digital formats.
it was the first real acknowledgement,
on a large scale, of digital,
and I was very pleased for anthony for that,
because I think he felt it was some acknowledgement
that he would never arrive at
because he'd chosen to specialize so much
in the digital world.
that'll be, I think, looked back on as,
"there you go, that was where it changed."
was gonna be my
next movie after
so I converted into thinking about 3D in '99
I knew immediately that the only way to shoot 3D,
that the future of shooting 3D was digital
we were starting to experiment with
putting 2 HD cameras side by side.
I thought the results were pretty cool.
then Vince Pace and I built
the fusion camera system.
you've decided to put one camera here
and another camera on top.
and what happens in here, then, to marry these two?
because stereoscopically, you need two images
to exist, right?
correct.
one of the problems that
we have with the larger cameras is the fact
that if we were to put them side by side...
like your 2 eyeballs, right?
you couldn't put those cameras physically in that position.
they would run into each other.
so we use a reflective mirror,
and then that allows us to overlay the 2 camera systems...
if you imagine form a physical standpoint,
where there is no limitation how close
we get the eyes together,
and that's really important for 3D
to create 3D,
2 cameras work as a pair, just like our 2 eyes.
they capture images from slightly different angles,
providing a sense of 3-dimensional depth and distance.
I have a joke with most of the people around me
that I long for when the world was flat
because it's not only the camera system duplicate.
everything duplicates down the chain, right?
so lensing, control over lensing.
and a lot people say, "that's as twice as hard
than that's incorrect statement
that's more than that
because these 2 cameras have to operate like
sign-missed twins
they have to mimic each other perfectly.
I think when films are done right and when it really works
is when it feels like I'm there, I'm in this journey,
I'm immersed in the story line.
the fun part for me is
to really get these tools in the creative hands,
the people that really can take it to places
where you never imagined before.
came out,
and I was really proud of those images.
they looked gorgeous,
and it was followed up by
and .
boom boom boom, 3 films in the marketplace,
one after another, and all of them were huge hits.
the 3 of them were the top grossing films of the year.
so all of a sudden,
the doors were just blown wide open on the whole thing.
people really saw the potential of this as a market.
this consumption of films has increased our audiences'
both appetite for them and, now, knowledge of them,
so therefore,
it's getting harder and harder to impress them.
it's one of the reasons why 3D is taking off.
it's just a new way of looking at a film.
the actor is like a piece of sculpture
or something, only it's moving and it comes out,
and, like,it's a combination when theater and film
and music and everything.
I hate 3D.
I put on those glasses, and I get sick to my stomach
it's dark looking through them.
the whole 3D phenomenon, is a marketing fucking scheme,
isn't it?
I can safely say, as a viewer,
I'm totally uninterested in it.
I'm without any interest whatsoever.
I think it's a fad.
I think it will burn out.
the studios are not wise to juse slap 3D on everything
with there's a reason that film is in 3D,
because it is taking you on an experience.
it isn't something that was added on
for money or a joke or a gimmick.
it's there because it was created that way.
is 2 completely different forms
of filmmaking combined.
we only use lenses for about 1/3 of the movie,
which is all sets and, just normal stuff...
lighting, normal live action.
we used virtual lenses for the other 2/3.
we never shot in a real jungle.
we had to create the jungle.
it was all computer modeling...
every blade of grass, every bug buzzling around...
not one foot of film shot in a real jungle.
you have this idea that you could home
in on a mathematically perfect model for creating reality
if you just throw enough computing power at it
and you just throw enough software on it.
guess what we found? lt didn't work. it required that
I, the artist and people who trained in photography
looking at how light interacted with those things
to figure out how to write the code,
to make it look "real"
what I find is,
the manipulations that the digital media like to do...
they are seductive but ultimately, they're a little bit hollow.
the analogy I I would always use is,
I remember this summer when chips ahoy, or whoever...
they came out with these chocolate chip cookies
that were like they just came out of the oven,
and they were soft.
it was like, "oh, this is amazing. it's a soft cookie."
and then after a couple of months,
you're like, "oh, no.
this is some horrible chemical crap
that's giving this bad illusion that fools you at first
my big concern is that the image ultimately with CGI
I don't know if our younger generation
is believing anything anymore on screen.
it's not real.
you are presenting a complete unreality
and making them feel like it's real,
whereas, before, it was captured in reality...
all right, you've...
I'm betting you've been on a couple of movie sets.
when was it ever real?
there was a kind of wall there and nothing over there.
there were 30 people standing around.
there was a guy with a boom mic,
there's another guy up on a ladder
with his ass crack hanging out.
there's a fake rain, your "street night exterior New York"
was a day interior Burbank.
what was ever real?
we're free of the old technology of capturing those images...
camera, film, lens... exposure
it gives me more control,
more choice, more ways
to access what you're imagining in your head.
computers will only get better and better.
you'll be able to produce anything you want,
completely realistically
and ultimately, if you've got enough time,
the world is your oyster.
we've had to try to outpace the audience's imagination,
do something they haven't seen before,
and every year, it has to be even more and more real.
the artists and the filmmakers are constantly
trying to up the amount of spectacle and realism,
and so that really put us in a positions of...
like never before,
really having to wed technology and art.
that's what's great about the digital technology
is that it sort of doubles in everything
about once every two years.
once you've set your mind on that path,
it all becomes very simple,
it's just gonne be a matter of time,
cause digital is gonna continue to improve.
camera companies like RED, ARRI,
SONY and others
are constantly developing new products
continue to make advances
in dynamic range,
resolution and color.
I love it that all these manufactures
are competing against each other
to make great cameras. make them smaller,
make them faster and cheaper, better sensors.
with dynamic range of a digital camera,
up until recently, has been limited to,
really, a maximum of 10 stops.
but you don't see that problem
in the EPIC or the Alexa.
the dynamic range was much better
when I was use to with digital.
up untill the mid-'90s, for ARRI,
it was all photochemical.
we saw the digital technology maturing to a point, though,
where we began investing in the digital technology.
the sensor that we use now in the Alexa camara
allowed us to offer a camera that
we can proudly promote as a feature film camera.
the Alexa takes all of that
we were excited about in terms of low-budget filmmaking
and then brings the sort of textural quality
that film has,
it brings that familiarity in terms of color space.
and the only reason I was realy interested in
using the Alexa was
because it was made by arriflex,
I'd heard that it was like shooting film but
with a digital format.
if I am pushed to shoot on digital,
I could take the Alexa and
I could probably get good results.
this is the new RED, which is called an EPIC.
so this is, believe it or not,
60% more resolution than a RED 1.
when Jim Jannard showed me the EPIC
you looked at it and you said: " wait a minute
"what does that do?
"how does that free you as a storyteller?"
this camera created those beautiful, rich,
very natural or very stylistically wonderful colors.
we've taken and digitally projected 4k images
on a gigantic screen,
and it is absolutely mind-blowing.
the delivery system of cinema is going to change,
and that's almost...kind of more exciting in a way
for me besides the actual cameras.
cause the ancient system of
putting a can of film on a truck,
driving it to a city, unloading it,
that being replaced.
the old way of having to ship giant film cans
around is very, very expensive,
so the business realized that
there was a tremendous possible savings
in digital delivery and digital projection.
we all want that pristine print.
we all want the first print of the negative,
but we, you know, we can't have that,
so you have to copy it.
and the advance of DCP is, there's no real copying.
once it's scanned, it doesn't get copied again.
it's cloned, so it's exactly the same thing.
I'm getting more impressed with digital projection
as much as...I'm not big on technology,
I think digital projection has become a long way.
in the last 2 years we've installed
10,000 digital projectors into cinemas.
the conversion is taking place globally.
we're probably 50% or more there,
and the rest of the conversions will happen very quickly.
they produce gorgeous pictures,
and you had a steady building of a wave.
that's why we're gonna be up
to 100,000 digital screens by 2015
the business model for printing film is endangered,
and ultimately, I hope that it doesn't take film with it.
as a kid, I went to the movies.
and you sat down, and there was, like, a big red curtain,
and then that curtain parted.
and there was... the movie was going to begin, right?
and you went "oh, my gosh! oh, this is special!"
well, that's my childhood image
it's not as special anymore.
it's another thing.
in a way, cinema was the church of the 20th century,
because everybody would come to
this large, dark room and sit
and looked up at this thing, which would tell you
an enormous amount how to dress, how to act,
be with behave with women, how to act hero.
something extraordinary about seeing
that actor's face as 40 feet high,
and at 40 feet hlgh,
there's something mythic about it
that's beyond your everyday life.
I think cinema should be huge, big expansion.
it should be 80 feet wide,
you should envelop the audience in the screen.
cause that's cinema ...yeah, that's cinema.
and the sound all round you and everything.
I mean, why people want to watch movies
on their computers, I shall never know.
I see people
watch movies on their iphone
in the subway all the time...
and I'm like "no!!!"
who am I to say that it's bad?
it doesn't have to be bad.
late at night, my wife's asleep and I can't sleep,
and I put up NetFlix
on my iphone
put on some good headphones and
watch a film that close to my face.
like, there is something interesting about that.
you can interact with things very privately now,
and I think, "what's missing?"
if I want to cry without people seeing,
I'm gonna put on the
and I'm gonna cry. and if my wife wakes up,
I'll just hit pause and put it under a pillow.
I mean, there's something interesting about that
I feel like we didn't get a chance to experience before.
if you get asked on a date, no body's like,
"let's get on the movies" anymore.
I don't even feel like that's going on, I feel like
people are like "let's, like,
watch something on Netflix streaming on my bed"
which might just be, like,
24-year-old guys' way of getting you to sit on their bed
but I think that's what's happening.
I can get any jean-luc godard movie.
I can get any movie from the past, anything.
and Nexflix will send it to me,
I can just sit down and watch it.
but you're not gonna see all the detail.
you won't be able to feel it
like you would be able to feel...
my big-screen TV is plenty big.
I mean, you go to theaters to make out with girls
and things like that,
but that, I'm way past that age, so...
sure?
Believe me
there's so many different way to watch a movie.
that shared experience aspect, too,
it's...you know, that's shifting,
from the "going to the movies"
Well it's also becoming much larger virtually
communal space will definitely expand virtually,
so we'll start watching movies together
in these sort of virtual worlds,
and that will be inevitable.
how do you have the Pheromone get exchanged virtually?
how do you... how do you bleed and sweat
and be comfortable...
you do all that in the theater? in your trench coat?
No, but laughing together and crying together.
and in some way, the virtual experience is more rewarding
because there is an actual dialog going on.
someone who's 20 years old does not care about
loss of cinemas as a communal space
they're interested in how they want to tell their story
and get it out to friends on facebook or whatever it is.
you got to go with it
and if you become unable to deal with it,
then that's fine, because that means your time is finished,
and, you know, it's time for all the people to take it on.
the kids, 30 and under
have seen endless digital images
on their computer, on their television
and that, to them, is their film.
I just had hoped that, these little cameras
would make kind of a revolution
where you would say, "fuck film school"
just do it ourselves.
there's a lot of talent and stuff that
could be freed by less respect.
everyone is interpreting
that reality or what they think is reality,
through an image, through a lens,
and some people are really,
some kids are really good at it, I got to tell you.
without digital video culture,
I don't think I ever would have been making movies
because I came at it from...
as a writer, and I always thought that
you have to have a certain kind of knowledge,
you have to be... basically, in my head, I was like,
"you've got to be a dude who knows
how to operate machines to do this job."
like, I think I would have been scared
to step into that role
if it had involved, like,
getting a huge camera and get 15
lightening technicians together.
it was like I was able to experiment
with making movies in this really small,
private way, which was that I needed to do.
What about the 5Ds? what about the DLSRs?
these cameras were designed at the request
of a.p. and reuters
so that there news stills photographers
could shoot news video for their websites.
that's it.
then people came along and went,
"ooh, I like the look of that, I'm gonna use that"
and it can work,
-but I hate them being used as movie cameras. -Why?
It's not good enough.
But they're inexpensive. people can make movies
If I'd been at art school and
I had a Canon 7D or a Canan 5D,
you know, it would be wonderful.
What are you shooting on tonight?
7D. on the canon 7D
for my second-year of grad film.
I guess it's the most accessible, it gives you a lot...
you can capture, but it's not super expensive
I want to shoot with the 7D or the 5D
primarily for budget reasons
and because we are given a week
in which we have to shoot our film.
and the amount of time that we would lose in terms of,
like, changing the film, checking the gate,
and being cautious then I would probably not
be able to film half the scenes I'd want to.
It becomes this very cheap way for us
to tell our stories about ourselves.
It takes these art forms out of a rarefied environment
and allows more people to make art.
everybody and his little brother
has a piece of paper and pencil,
but how many great stories had been written
on that piece of paper?
Now the same thing is gonna happen in, cinema.
there used to be that encumbrance,
where filmmakers were guys who...
people who just sat around coffee shops and saying
what great films they would make
if "the man" would ever give them a chance.
It was kind of great when, like,
the day came that it was, "well, go do it."
everybody can make a movie now.
movies everywhere. that's a good thing.
I don't think so. actually, there's less good.
there's more bad
because everybody is able to do whatever they want to do.
that's democratization of it, that's fantastic
but I think my kids will suffer.
they will not have the quality that we had growing up
'cause there isn't somebody there...
there isn't a tastemaker involved.
Wow!
Is it the end of film? What do you think?
I think celluloid is still gonna be a choice.
a transition starts with people offering a new choice,
but it finishes with taking the old choice away,
and I don't think technically we're ready to do that yet.
well, we have 100 years of experience,
basically, shooting on film,
and film it still around.
nobody but George Lucas said, that"film is dead."
and he said that 20 years ago,
and film is not dead,
because people still like to shoot on film,
because it really has an incredibly beautiful look.
Who cares, you know?
20 years from now, they won't be saying,
"it looks like film."
they'll be saying "look at what I can do with my digital."
I will be one of the last guys shooting film
and Chris Nolan will be one of the last
directors shooting film,
But I'm certain we'll be using digital
technology within the next 10 years.
I hope, 5 or 10 years down the road film still exists.
I mean, I still plan to shoot on film.
Is it the end of film?
Yeah, I guess it is,
and I think in 5 years, film will be...
film will be exception, I really do.
film production peaked in 2007.
our factory, at that time, was working at 110%
to produce film cameras.
then what happened?
then the world changed.
New purchases are all digital.
film cameras can last for decades,
and they will be still available and in use.
however, our major manufactures
have ceased development of new film cameras.
they no longer make them.
we will have to say goodbye to celluloid.
it will go away, I'm afraid,
and it'll be kept for special occasions, I think,
but it's gonna change.
once that option is gone...
Right
once young people don't have the experience
I think we're living through it's total transformation.
I mean, I think, in general,
people's fear is that it's just gonna be endless noise
and no one will be able to tell what's good or bad,
and no one will be able to make good things
and good things will just get lost.
that's a danger, I think, in the continuation of our culture.
What do you go back to when you need to back to the well?
Right
Where did you get the nourishment of culturally,
artistically, intellectually?
Where did you get it?
an important step in the moviemaking process is archival
storing the final complete movie and materials
used to create it.
nobody takes archiving seriously.
they go, "oh, I'll save it on hard drive,"
and they put the hard drive on the shelf, and a year later,
You load it, it just goes "tick...tick...tick"
'cause they stick.
if you don't fire them up all time, they stick.
if you do fire them up all the time,
they wear out and go "tick...tick...tick"
since the early 1950s,
since the advent of the commercial television,
there have been 80 formats of video to date.
80 formats of video, ok?
and most of them cannot be played anymore
because the machines simply don't exist.
When we make a movie,
we have 2 digital copies of all of the dailies.
well, when you box those up to be stored,
you have to put a reader in with that thing.
I have archival tape formats for music video
and commercials that I did in 1980s,
and there's no machines that can play them.
there are no archival formats worth anything
in the digital realm that you would put any stock in,
so there are all kinds of issues that
simply haven't been dealt with yet.
the only way you can make sure that a film
or anything of a moving image
is gonna be around, maybe, 60 to 70 years from now...
interestingly enough, ironically enough
is celluloid.
film is unique
because film is a capture medium and a storage medium
so if you really want to go back
and if you've store it under the right conditions,
a hundred years later,
all you have to do is shine light through it
and you'll be able to see it.
it will never be format-obsolete.
there was a conference in 1909
where they put together the standard for film.
well, that hasn't changed in 102 years.
if I have a film in my nitrate vaults
I can pull it out and run it on the projector today,
even though it may have been made in 1895.
If the point, ultimately, of archiving is
the faithful reproduction of the original product,
filmmakers now... I, as a filmmaker, now have a better chance
of something I made being shown properly 50 years from now
that I ever have in history.
people keep saying
"we don't know what's going to happen in 50 years," we don't
"no one's gonna be able to read the information" or
"it's going to decay", or,
"you have to migrate it or it will die."
yeah, sure, you will, and some of the those things are true.
all of them are better scenarios than film.
all of everything in this whole world
is stored digitally.
yeah
so, yeah, there's problems with it, right?
but they're gonna solve those problems.
I'll guarantee that.
there's too much digital information out there
not to figure out a fullproof way to storage it forever.
archeology always improves,
so as the way we lose things change,
the way that we invent to find them changes.
so you're not worried about all these disappearing?
if things are important for human beings,
we figure out ways to preserve them,
always been true.
yes, we lose stuff,
but that's part of life.
We might get to the stage where
a print of a film is so rare that
it's almost like an art object
that we can go back and say,
"this is actually a print of film and
it's the only one of the world."
100, 200 years from now, there won't be a trace of us left,
and there won't be trace of anything we make now.
so where are we? we're fucked.
I don't believe for one second
that digital imaging or digital technology
will ever take the way the humanity of storytelling,
beause storytelling, in and of itself,
is a wholly human concern.
art is very primordial, science is also very primordial,
so I kind of see all these things as just,
sort of...they're very harmonious things
that always have to push on one another.
we are at the top of photochemical process.
this is about far as it's ever gonna go
when you're using digital,
you are at the very bottom again.
so you should jump over and help to build that,
'cause the more people that use it, the better it gets.
unless you are participating with the revolution,
we will be lost in past.
we can't count ourselves out and say "we don't care.
it's up to you guys"
no. so we have to be in.
then everyone will have access to
both the means of production
and watching everthing that's ever existed instantly.
as digital continues to change the nature of storytelling,
we'll also continue to change
in ways that I don't even know I could understand,
but all things do that,
and it becomes a giant revolution.
people love great stories, they like them
to get into a world and have an experience.
and how they get there, it doesn't really matter.
one shouldn't even think,
"we've stopped and now we've reached digital. this is it."
no, no, think about where the entertainment impulse
Where the need is going to go.
Do you feel, technologically, with where you are...
Dou you feel free?
I'm not sure that I ever want to feel
that we arrived, technologically.
I always want to feel there's something we can do better.
the people who have come before us
gave the world new ways to dream,
and I think it's our job to continue that
and to try to give people new ways to dream.
Everything comes down to one thing
if you do something with your heart
if you do something that
you are convinced of and feel about it
it doesn't matter what you're using.