Side by Side (2012)

[bunniefuu]

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 sh**t

a film on film, but I don't hear anybody being asked to justify

why they want to sh**t 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 k*ll the goose that laid

the golden egg but they'll s*domize 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 sh**ting 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 sh**t 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

sh**t 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 sh**ting.

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 sh**ting film

was the director of

photography's art and secret.

And today, the cinematographer

is monitored on a digital sh**t,

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 sh**t.

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 sh**t.

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 f*ck?"

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 sh*t 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

sh**ting 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 sh**ting

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.

sh**ting a film on video at that point meant it was crap.

It was almost, you know, an

accepted truth that you didn't

sh**t 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 f*ckin' doomed, man.

I remember when we were

presenting it at Sundance.

They were scared to death that the reaction would be "this was sh*t on video."

The digital presentation did not

look nearly, in any way, like an

acceptable substitute for what film was.

Because of, um...

p*rn 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

sh**t 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 sh**t 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 ex*cuted

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 sh**t as much as

I wanted.

I could get the best performances.

I didn't have to worry about sh**ting 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 sh**t

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 sh*t together.

I'm on my feet 14 hours a day.

I'm sh**ting 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 sh*t 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 sh*ts.

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 sh*t

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 sh**t 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 sh*t 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 sh**t, 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 sh*ts 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 sh*ts, 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 sh**ting on film.

We weren't sh**ting 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 sh**t 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 sh*t 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 att*ck of the Clones.

It was the first major feature

that was sh*t 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 sh*t att*ck of the Clones digitally, but he didn't.

We have word that he actually used film cameras, that he's not sh**ting 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 sh*t Star Wars that he

wouldn't sh**t another film on

film again.

And that created, you know,

quite an uproar in Hollywood.

Digital technology and

digital cameras looked like

a thr*at 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 sh**t 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 sh*t 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 sh*t,

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

ex*cuted.

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

sh**ting 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, sh*t 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 f*cking 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 sh*t, 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 sh**ting digitally.

If you have sort of a range between dark and bright in film like this.

sh**ting 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 sh**t 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 sh**t

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 w*r 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 sh**t 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 sh*t 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 sh**t 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

sh**ting 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 sh*ts 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 sh*t 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 sh**t 3-D-that the

future of sh**ting 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 f*cking 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 sh*t 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 sh*t 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 cr*ck 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 sh**ting film but with a digital format.

If I am pushed to sh**t 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, "f*ck 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 sh**t

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 sh**ting 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 sh**t with the 7d or the 5d primarily for budget

reasons and because we are given a week in which we have to sh**t 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, sh**ting

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

sh**t 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 sh**ting film and Chris

Nolan will be one of the last

directors sh**ting 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 sh**t 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 f*cked.

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.