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.
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,
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-
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,
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
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,
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
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-
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
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,
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
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,
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?
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?
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
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,
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."
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.