Since the late 1880s, visual artists and storytellers have
used moving images to create amazing works.
You ain't heard nothing yet.
Movies have inspired us...
I have something more than a hope.
Thrilled us, and captured our imaginations.
Film has helped us 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 recently that a new technology has emerged that is
challenging film's place as the gold standard for quality and work flow.
Digital technology is evolving to a point that may very well
replace film as the primary means of creating and sharing motion pictures.
The documentary we're doing is called side by side, and 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 tipping point.
In this conversation, in this kind of 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 worked its way through our culture,
we're on to another level.
And how do you use it to tell a story?
How do you use it to paint a picture?
Are you done with film?
Don't hold me to it, Keanu, but I think I am.
Digital cameras are the new aesthetic that's coming to cinema,
and at the same time, we're 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 wanted whatever I could imagine to be something that we could 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 are people who will not only kill the goose that laid
the golden egg but they'll sodomize it first.
If the intention is that digital is gonna replace film,
I would be sad if it didn't actually 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 the 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 got to
be a part of that.
Who's 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 are gonna be many of us that are gonna fight for film,
that are gonna fight for the experience of shooting on emulsion.
We really are in the midst of some sort of revolution that
threatens the status quo.
This is a potentially either scary thing or a 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.
Now take your big bolge camera off, please.
There.
Action.
A director of photography looks at color and composition
and angles and all of these things in terms of how the movie is being built.
The quality of light off skin, the quality of light through
hair, the quality of light through the window or 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 being- somehow being- you know, the 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, you know, if you will, that
technical expertise- you can't explain what you're
gonna do, so there is a certain amount of a 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 era, you also have to be a bit of a
technician and you have to know the equipment.
and it's really important for DPs to understand the entire
link of the image chain from acquisition to exhibition.
Ready to go in five and...
on five, please.
And action.
The camera is a tool that focuses and measures photons of
light and records them as images.
With a film camera, light enters
through the lens and hits a
frame of film behind the lens.
The film is covered with an emulsion that contains grains
of silver halide crystals.
These crystals react chemically when light hits them, and the
crystals change into silver metal when they are developed.
A photographic image is formed on the film.
There is something about the texture and 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 a sort of
textural quality.
You still have some granularity in the image that keeps highlights living.
It 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 a film set basically means that you take
thousand-foot loads of film,
load it into the magazines, and that enables you to shoot for
roughly ten- plus minutes per roll of film.
Cut.
That's a cut.
Camera reload.
And then it gives you 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 a 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,
you know, the genies on set.
You know, that's why we love dailies.
We'd all go, we'd act, we'd light, we'd do what we do,
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 gave 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.
But I don't like the betrayal of dailies.
I don't like going in and seeing and getting, you know, swept up
with a performance and then seeing it go out of 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 through
the day, end of the day:
"Did we get anything today?
I don't even remember.
Did we get"-
It didn't feel like we put the flag in it 'cause you couldn't see.
It's like painting with the lights off.
But the DP would 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, you know?
And so the result is a kind of fuzziness, whereas with the
pixel count, it's a very finite, accurate, exact thing.
So we're gonna do one action for dolly and camera.
I think that worked last time.
And action.
With digital cameras and monitors, you are able to see
exactly what you are recording on set as you are shooting.
That's nice.
Unlike film cameras, you don't have to wait a day to see what you've captured.
They are no longer "dailies."
They are "immediatelies."
You sit round the back of the set or in a 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 the old film capture, it was overnight, and sometimes
you'd go to bed and think,
"I wonder if I got that right," you know?
Or you'd say, "I 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."
Okay, cut.
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 that
film on a screen that is, you know, a thousand times bigger than that.
You know, you're watching it on a large tv.
Yes, you see what you're getting.
It's right there.
The problem for me is that I still think you need to see rushes later.
I think, in order to concentrate with the performances or just
the movement, and that's-
I still think you need to see them at a special time.
The process of shooting film was the director of
photography's art and secret.
And today, the cinematographer is monitored on a 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 every take.
With one of the actors, I was able to talk him out of it
because it was making his performances very self-conscious.
Right.
I also am convinced that everybody's just looking at their hair.
One of the great pleasures of being a cameraman was that the
people- the suits and the producers- well, 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 know 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 they can shoot.
It's not like it used to be.
There are cinematographers who became cinematographers
because they love the voodoo of it.
They love it when the director says to them, "All right, down
in that corner- 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.
I've sat in dailies and I've gone, "oh."
You know, some of Darius Khondji's work on se7en, you would just go, "wow."
But there is an equal amount of times that 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 this 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.
The chairman and founder- Akio Morita, who 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 the equivalent, if not better than,
35-millimeter 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 used cinematically when they were
embraced by the dogma 95 movement out of Denmark.
Can you speak a little bit about- well, where did you first
come into 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 35 millimeter, and then one of them said it had
to be a handheld camera also.
And then I said, "but if that is the case, then we can also
use video."
And that was just at the same time as these cameras kind of appeared.
Anthony Dod Mantle was the DP who shot the first dogma
film, Thomas Vinterberg's Celebration.
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 and I had
a Sony PC3, which actually was the camera I ended up
shooting Celebration on.
And I remember seeing this crowd of, like, supporters just moving
across this field with an industrial backdrop.
It was misty and hazy, and it was kind of gothic.
I was just learning how to play with it, and I just whipped it
around, and then 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 camera is, I caught that.
Two months later, I'm shooting Celebration on these small
cameras 'cause I wanted to be a protagonist in the Celebration.
Hi, pa.
The combination of the movement and the activity and
the emotion- the emotional movement of that camera 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 that I didn't know in my cinema...
And that became my donation to the Celebration.
What celebration meant and what a lot of the other films of
that era meant was that you just had 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.
I'll get it.
You want me to get it?
No, I got it.
With DV came this whole idea of, "Well, wait a second.
If we lower our budgets, we get more freedom as directors and as producers.
Shooting a film on video at that point meant it was crap.
It was almost, you know, an accepted truth that you didn't
shoot films that you were 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 Chuck and Buck.
Hey, Buck.
Oh, hi.
Can I get you something to drink?
Oh, no, that's all right.
Looking at rushes, it was scary as hell.
Would you like some ice cream?
Really?
Oh, mmm.
I like ice cream.
We were, like, "My god, this looks so amateurish."
A lot of people actually commented on how muddled it looked.
I think we're fuckin' doomed, man.
I remember when we were presenting it at Sundance.
They were scared to death that the reaction would be "this was shot on video."
The digital presentation did not look nearly, in any way, like an
acceptable substitute for what film was.
Because of, um...
porn and because of documentary and because of news footage,
video occupies 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 Chuck and Buck better.
People were starting to think in a completely different way about,
"how could the technology and the medium help us to rethink filmmaking?"
You started to see people start to challenge the idea-
as did the group known as Indigent.
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?
Mm-hmm.
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.
I remember, though, my first year at Sundance, we had 225
submissions total for the fiction category.
You know, a few years later, it was ten times that.
Back to, like, you know, the Sundance days or, you know,
the releases of indigent, people were saying, "Well, that's okay
for you- it's independent- but this isn't cinema.
This isn't"-
that was a huge thing to make a film on a video camera and go
to Sundance and win Best Director and win Best Film for Personal Velocity.
Tell us about her.
Gary's own film, Tadpole, ended up being sold for an 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 the debate started.
I mean, you must have heard in the late '90s "film is the gold standard."
Yeah.
And the tools that you're playing with are what?
Debasing, threatening.
I have been slapped around.
If you want to-
What do you mean, "slapped around"?
I-I mean, I've been applauded and almost executed
for the same sentence.
it was quite obvious for me to go to digital, because of,
you know, the material you could have in the camera.
The amount of material you could have in the 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-
as you know, Keanu, ten minutes was maximum.
It wasn't even really ten.
It was nine-something, you know.
And when that thing starts rolling, there's a kind of
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 could get the best performances.
I didn't have to worry about shooting these little bursts of film.
You know, that was ridiculous, but that's 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.
Reveal.
And now you go around and look up.
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," then all of a sudden, everybody gets in
there, and you were at a place where it was just there, and
then everything stops.
And it's like, "Okay, now go back to that."
Now it's like, "No, just run the camera, back to one."
Okay, guys, stand by. In five.
As fast as you can get back to your position, you can go again.
And I've just always felt there was just way too much waiting,
because movies for me, there's always that momentum problem,
you know, 'cause I grew 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
a 45-minute take or something and not reload the cameras,
because the truth is, the entire crew can only concentrate, the
actors can only concentrate for so long, and then you need a
two-minute break, a three-minute 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-when they hear the
money running through the camera, basically-everybody
brings their "a" game.
Action.
Then puts it together again, how it carries you to-
The first time I'd ever heard the whir of film going through
a camera, it was thrilling.
Also made me very nervous because all of the sudden,
each take counted in a way that I had 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 ten-minute reel is so finite.
It's almost an athletic thing, like, "focus, focus.
Uh."
You know, like, that's good for the-
That's just atmosphere, though, you know?
I mean, if you want that, you can create that, right?
I thought it would make a difference to actors.
I don't think it does particularly to actors.
I think actors just infinitely adjust to whatever they-
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're on digital now.
Yeah, but my first experience with that was just, you know,
there was no "cut."
You know, I worked with Richard Linklater on a film called
a Scanner Darkly...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was just like- you could just go on.
Yeah, I was just, like, "Can we please stop?"
"Stop."
No, we don't have to. But-but I wanted to.
Camera right or left?
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 and stuff.
Just-he would go off and he would pee, and then he'd bring it back.
And that was his, like, form of protest.
I'd previously worked on celluloid only, really, and been
thrilled, you know, to arrive at the holy grail of celluloid.
It was, like, amazing.
So I made the first few films on celluloid.
I made a very big hollywood film, The Beach,
with Leonardo Dicaprio 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 Celebration.
It wasn't so much the film.
It wasn't even the look.
It was the camera operating, that movement of the camera.
And so I got in touch with the guy who shot it, Anthony Dod Mantle,
and I said, "well,
I feel like I'm not doing the right thing anymore.
Can we do something together digitally?"
Which-I didn't really know what I was saying by saying that.
It was kind of like a new word, in a way.
Then we came up with the script, 28 days later, and we shot it
on consumer cameras.
But I remember Anthony saying to me, "It's all very well working
in this format, you know," but he said, "I'll never get an Oscar."
There was a sequence in it at the beginning where the
character, Cillian Murphy, wanders round a deserted London.
Hello!
And we would not have been able to achieve the film
on film, because we had to stop 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 they're so cheap,
and he could walk through Central London- an area of it-
and we had ten cameras on it.
So you'd only have to stop the traffic for a few minutes,
and then you would actually have ten shots.
That was an enormous advantage. well, I placed cameras
around- not coincidentally and not badly and 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, two or three pixels.
I mean, there was nothing there.
There was just the color.
Quality-wise, if you put it up against an exact copy of it on film,
the film would be immeasurably superior,
But you could shoot illegally and 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 loved that freedom, and I got the taste for it then.
And I knew once we'd shot that sequence, that I was gonna work on it now.
That was what 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, they looked at it
through the moviola, and then you slapped it together like
this-you remember, the white gloves- and they were incredibly
fast at it.
I'd find the frame, I'd-you know, sometimes splicing to the
point of, you know, getting your fingertips bloodied, you know,
and that was really the blood in the film.
So, I mean, you really had it, and now it's, you know,
pressing little buttons.
Now this is the floppy disk that we're all familiar with.
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 a whole thing going.
We started a picture editing system that was all digital.
We had the first Edit Droid working in 1980,
and eventually, we 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 five years' 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 the English Patient, I suddenly really
looked at the image and said, "Oh, no."
"How am I gonna be able to do this?"
When I'd work with older editors, they'll often talk
about the time when computers were starting to come in
and say, you know, 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 pushed 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 a movie
on film, that's just the technology.
The art form is the manipulation of images to tell a story.
It was extremely difficult for me to learn because I hadn't used a computer.
I thought a mouse was something 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 okay, and I liked it.
There's no film in the editing bay.
It's all a kind of- it's drives, and it's quiet.
You know, I don't hear-I used to hear...
You know, the reels on the benches.
It was a very noisy, kind of bustling atmosphere, and now
it's very quiet.
It's almost like, you know, 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 were 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 that if they work on film, they have probably trained
their minds to do that a little bit more.
And 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 Lawrence of Arabia where 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 a 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 a direct cut, and so, when we saw it, we thought,
"Wow, that's fantastic."
It just worked.
It just was magic, you know, 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, you know?
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 need to be manufactured in some way.
Being a 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 light
reacts to 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,
you know, and that's an interesting combination.
Originally, when effects were done, or for the first 100 years
that effects were done, they were done, you know, with
models and with film cameras, and they were 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 the Star Wars 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, everything.
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 three other people and critique
a model or talk about how cool something looks under real
lighting is pretty satisfying.
And all of this 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 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 Star Wars, 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, and we developed the
pixar computer for I.L.M.
I'm right now in one of our three computer rooms that we
have here at I.L.M., and what we have here are thousands and
millions of cycles of computing power going by every single second.
So I kind of pushed the stuff- 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 started to become possible to scan in film and bring 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 ones and zeros, and they just
stay as ones and zeros 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, okay?
It was using digital technology to realize visions.
Okay, if you can take a piece of film and 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 Young Sherlock Holmes.
We had 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 six months to do seven shots, which was pretty
complicated but amazing that we got it done in that amount of time.
George was always very progressive about digital,
and it was just something about that-the effects community
just got comfortable with it really early on.
Get rid of the flare!
I was just trying to be a sheepdog.
Ha!
Enough wolves in the world already.
Now we were still shooting on film.
We weren't shooting with digital cameras yet, but all of the post
processes were starting 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 was that you realized you were 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 problem 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."
And 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 Star Wars Episode II was gonna be shot digitally.
We need to get that all worked out and get our 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 the
more detail an image will have.
A typical standard- definition, or SD, camera usually had
a resolution of about 720x480 pixels.
Really, the turning point was in the year 2000 when we came
out with the 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
1,920 pixels across-just under 2k.
In 2002, we did Attack of the Clones.
It was the first major feature that was shot high-definition.
What George did on the Star Wars movie was take an
experimental hd camera and apply it to a feature-film paradigm.
That was unthinkable at the 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 meeting, 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 Attack of the Clones digitally, but he didn't.
We have 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 reproduction 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 the F900 wasn't designed
like a film camera.
Of course, George Lucas said after he shot Star Wars that he
wouldn't shoot another film on film again.
And that created, you know, 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 looked like we were messing around with art.
You know, they would say, "Why are you going backwards?"
You know?
But there's a lot to be said about the necessity to kind of
lean back to be able to spring forward.
See, I remember George Lucas pulling together everybody about
ten 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 this is 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 ten 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 it is.
He always does.
I can tell that 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 Sin City 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.
Sin City 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 Sin City 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.
You know, I was just so amazed- the richness that it had.
I didn't know it was even possible, but the systems got
better for color timing it 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, you know, there was only
black and white.
These scenes show the darkroom 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 adjustments 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 director of photography and make it happen
on a piece of film.
Like, I would sit with the director or the director of
photography, and they would say, "That looks a little bit too red
to me" or "too blue," and we would manipulate it in our mind
as to how much to change it or to make different cuts balance
with each other.
Well, the timers on the film, they got to deal with pretty
much from the head, you know, by the intuition, you know.
Yeah.
It was hard.
It was very hard.
So, you know, there was a lot of art and labor involved in it.
You know, those 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 an 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 the actors' eyes and see all
of the emotion that he wants 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, you
know, 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 within reason.
Who invented this process?
You know, 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, whatever, ten years,
it's just evolved to become a lot more streamlined.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Was really the first movie where
basically every single frame was a visual effect.
So it was all color timed digitally for the look.
So it was the first D.I.
It was just kind of- you know, roger deakins is sittin' in the
room saying, "I can't get what I want in photochemical because
every time I color time it this nice golden color, I lose all 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, "Okay, we can key it.
What we can 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 in the 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 necessity of the look for the movie and then
other people kind of catching on, saying, "ooh, I could use
that in-" you know?
It just became, you know, more and more popular.
Timing is a very frustrating process on photochemical.
It's just very crude.
It's very-you can hardly do anything.
That's the whole thing about D.I.
When I could go in and circle little things and make a face a
little bit redder and, you know, 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 or 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 that really gets to touch it.
It started off as being very adversarial between
cinematographers and colorists because it was like, "Oh, well,
he shouldn't be determining what the look of the film is.
I do that."
The beauty of these projects these days is, it's a team.
I think it could take 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
D.I. and that they supervise that so that their vision that
they originally intended was executed.
On The Gangs of New York, they offered me to do a D.I,
but because everything was built for us, what we had on
screen was exactly what we wanted.
We didn't have to have a D.I. 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 D.I.
Okay, if you have a special story where you need to change
the reality, then a D.I. is something wonderful, because you
can do whatever you want with 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 a 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 have some prints that are
perfect and then some prints- I mean, do you have to kind of
let it go once you create 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
laboring on, every theater looks different.
They have the luminance on their projector at a different level
or, you know, 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, you know.
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 and see it in
a real theater.
Titanic played so long in theaters that 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 Phantom Menace digitally.
We had two theaters in New York, two theaters in L.A., and that
was the first time that a 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 only 150.
The post flow was already there.
It was all digital, and the rest of the industry was going there.
Sound had already gone there.
Editorial had gone there.
Editorial was-yeah.
The camera was lagging behind, you know?
New companies began to develop high- definition cameras,
and other Hollywood films followed Lucas's lead.
Michael Mann's Collateral used the Thomson Viper, an HD camera
that outperformed film at shooting in dark environments.
Michael 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 boundaries of what the digital was capable of.
Collateral 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 and magenta and 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 sensitivity of, you know, CCD chips.
They see a little more of the U.V. 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,
etaining 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 a real format, and we decided
that the best thing we can do is design what I like to call
"A film camera that takes tape."
And that's when we started drawing out the Genesis.
Genesis is a full-frame, 35-millimeter chip that allows
depth of field to be very similar to film, and we could
use all of our 35-millimeter lenses, which totaled in the
thousands, literally.
And we went to 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 35-mil-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 35 mil, 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 that
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 Dances with Wolves, shot Apocalypto down in
Mexico, where the temperature was 100 degrees and the humidity
was 200, and never had a second of downtime.
He felt that it was like a film camera.
It's 35 pounds.
The fucking camera is this big, and on the top of it, it looks
like a film magazine.
The recorder attached to it the same way that a mag would
attach to it- so on the top or on the back.
If I want to see what just got shot, does it play back off that?
They said, "no, you would 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 dollars developing a camera with Sony,
and I can't play the HD back to look at it because that's the 'negative'?"
Alonzo?
Where we were in '06, '07
was, we had the color space and we had the resolution, but we
didn't have the dynamic range.
So you had to be careful.
You had to be careful on the set.
Dynamic range is vital.
Dynamic range is more important than anything for me.
I mean, that's what really slows me down when I'm shooting 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 is 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 five stops and still have something
in the image.
You can't underexpose it by four stops and 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
multibillion 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 manufacturers 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 One was available to the public.
This new generation of digital cameras could now shoot more
resolution than HD, an increase in pixels from about 2k to 4k.
When I saw the Red, I really felt I should call film on the
phone and say, "I've met someone," 'cause I really thought,
"This is-okay, this is the future."
The resolution, the curve, the way it saw light-I just felt,
"This is the new thing"
and was insistent that we shoot Che on it.
Muchacho.
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.
Okay, it's cheap, but it's not good enough,
and I actually experienced the limitation of that.
Well, you know, 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 in 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
ravine 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 that 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 One is 9 pounds, and put a lens on it, 14 pounds.
on social network,
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.
You know, I'll topple this boat."
And he said, "Okay, what do you want me to do?"
I said, "You got to take one, you got to bore it out, you got
to-whatever it is you have to do.
You've got to figure out a way.
You got to give me the indie car version of the Red One."
This was on a 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-
51/2 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 Mumbai,
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 really 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 of film, and we wanted a camera that 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 high- definition 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 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 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 backpack 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, you know- 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- 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 during the scene.
In 2009, Slumdog Millionaire 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 Aademy Awards.
Do you feel like that film-
Yeah.
Did that film make digital acceptable in the mainstream now?
The success of Slumdog with the 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.
You know, that'll be, I think, looked back on as, "there you go;
that was where it changed."
Avatar was gonna be my next movie after titanic, so I
converted into thinking about 3-D in '99.
I knew immediately that the only way to shoot 3-D-that the
future of shooting 3-D was digital.
We were starting to experiment
with putting two 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 the 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 two
eyeballs, right? - You couldn't put those cameras physically in
that same position.
They would run into each other.
So we use a reflective mirror, and then that allows us to
overlay the two camera systems- if you imagine from a physical
standpoint- where there is no limitation on how close we get
the eyes together, and that's really important for 3-D.
To create 3-D, two cameras work as a pair, just like our two eyes.
They capture images from slightly different angles,
providing a sense of three-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
systems duplicate.
Everything duplicates down the chain, right?
So lensing, control over lensing.
And a lot of people say, "Well, then it's twice as hard," and
that's an incorrect statement.
It's more than that, because these two cameras have to
operate like siamese twins.
They have to mimic each other perfectly.
Some stereo in here.
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 really that can take it places where you
never imagined before.
Avatar came out, and I'm really proud of those images.
They looked gorgeous, and it was followed up by
Alice in Wonderland and How to Train Your Dragon.
Boom, boom, boom.
Three films in the marketplace, one after another, and all of
them were huge hits.
The three of them were the top grossing films of the year.
So all of a sudden, you know, 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 I think 3-D 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 of
theater and film and music and everything.
I hate 3-D.
I put on those glasses, I get sick to my stomach.
It's dark looking through them.
The whole 3-D phenomenon, it's 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 just slap 3-D on everything.
With Avatar, there's a reason that film is in 3-D, 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.
Avatar is two completely different forms of filmmaking combined.
We only use lenses for about 1/3 of the movie, which is all
sets and, you know, 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 buzzing 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 at it.
Guess what we found?
It didn't work.
It required that I, the artist, and people who were trained in
photography and looking at how light interacted with 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 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're 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 a wall there and nothing over there.
There was 30 people standing around.
There was a guy with a boom mic.
There's another guy up on a ladder with his ass crack hangin' out.
There's 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 you 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 puts us in
the position 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 gonna 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 and continue to make
advances in dynamic range, resolution, and color.
I love it that all of these manufacturers are competing
against each other to make great cameras.
Make them smaller, make them faster, cheaper, better sensors.
The dynamic range of a digital camera, up until
recently, has been limited to, really, a maximum of ten stops.
But you don't see that problem in the epic or the Alexa.
The dynamic range was much better than I was used to with digital.
up until the mid-'90s, for
Arri, it was all photochemical.
We saw the digital technology maturing to a point, though,
where we began investing in digital technology.
The sensor that we use now in the Alexa camera 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, you know?
It brings that familiarity in terms of color space.
And the only reason I was really interested in using the
Alexa was because it was made by Arriflex, and I had 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 One.
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 up as a- as a storyteller?"
This camera creates these 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.
Because the very ancient system of putting a can of film on a
truck, driving it to a city, unloading it.
That's 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 off the negative, but we, you know,
we can't have that, so you have to copy it.
And the advantage of a 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, you know, I'm not big on technology, I think digital
projection has come a long way.
In the last two 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 that 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. Whoa, 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 look up at this thing, which would tell you an enormous
amount of how to dress, how to act, how to behave with women,
how to be a hero.
There's something extraordinary about seeing that
actor's face as 40 feet high,
and at 40 feet high, there's something mythic about it that's
beyond your everyday life.
I think cinema should be a huge, big expansion.
It should be 80 feet wide, and 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 pull up Netflix on my iphone, put on some good headphones and
watch a film that close to my face.
Like, there's 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
steel magnolias, you know, 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 that
I feel like we didn't get a chance to experience before.
if you get asked on a date,
Nobody's like, "Let's go to 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 that's
what's happening.
I can get any Jean-Luc Godard movie.
I can get any movie from the past, anything.
And netflix will send it to me, and 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 can go to theaters to make out with girls and
things like that, but that- you know, I'm way past that age,
so...
Sure.
Believe me.
There's so many different ways 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, you know?
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 pheromones get exchanged virtually?
How do you-
how do you bleed and sweat and
be comfortable and uncomfortable-
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's an actual
dialogue going on.
Someone who's 20 years old does not care about the loss of
cinemas as a communal space, you know?
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, you know?
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 other 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, you know, 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, you know?
And some people are really-some
kids are really good at it,
I got to tell ya.
How come you never use me in any pictures?
You're never here.
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, you know, like, getting a huge camera and
getting 15 lighting technicians together.
It was like I was able to experiment with making movies in
this really small, private way, which was what I needed to do.
What about the 5Ds?
What about the DSLRs?
These cameras were designed at the request of A.P. and
Reuters so that their 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 canon 5D, you know, it would have been wonderful.
What are you shooting on tonight?
7D.
On the canon 7D for my second-year grad film.
And action.
I guess it's the most accessible, it gives you a lot-
you can capture, but it's not super expensive, it's-
I wanted 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's become 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.
And cut.
let's do that one again.
Everybody and his little brother has a piece of paper and
a pencil, but how many great stories have been written on
that piece of paper?
Now the same thing's gonna happen in, you know, cinema.
There used to be that encumbrance, you know, where
filmmakers were guys who-you know, people who just sat around
coffee shops 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's able to do whatever they want to do.
There's democratization of it-
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 is still around.
Nobody but George Lucas said, you know, 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 a 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 ten years.
I hope five or ten 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 five years, film
will be- film will be the 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 still be
available and in use.
However, all major manufacturers have ceased development of new
film cameras.
They no longer make them.
We will have to say "good- bye" 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 the young people don't have that experience-
I think we're living through its 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
that 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 go back to the well?
Where do you get the nourishment culturally, artistically, intellectually?
Where do you get it?
An important step in the moviemaking process is archival:
Storing the final complete movie and the 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, and it goes, "tick, tick, tick,"
'cause they stick.
If you don't fire them up all the 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 commercial
television, there have been 80 formats of video to date.
80 formats of video, okay?
And most of them cannot be played anymore because the
machines simply don't exist.
When we make a movie, we have two digital copies of all of the dailies.
Well, when you box those up to be stored, you have to put a
reader in with the thing.
I have archival tape formats for music videos and commercials
that I did in the 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 stored it
under the right conditions, 100 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 a 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 than I ever have in history.
People keep saying, "we don't know what's going to happen in
that 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'll die."
Yeah, sure.
You will.
And some of 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, it doesn't-you know, 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 foolproof way to store it forever.
Archaeology always improves, so as the way that we lose
things change, the way that we invent to find them changes.
So you're not worried about it all disappearing?
If things are important to 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 a film and it's the
only one in the world."
100, 200 years from now, there won't be a trace of us
left, and there won't be a 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 away the humanity of
storytelling, because 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 of 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 the photochemical process.
This is about as far as it's ever gonna go.
When you're using digital, you're at the very bottom again.
So you should jump over and help 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 ourself 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 anything 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 this becomes a giant revolution.
People love great stories.
They like 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- do you feel free?
I'm not sure I ever want to feel that we've 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 use.