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Topic: Another Christopher Nolan anti-digital rant
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-13-2015 01:09 PM
quote: The Guardian
Cinema chains need to drastically improve the experience they offer to customers or the next generation of moviegoers will stop going, the film director Christopher Nolan has said.
British-born Nolan, one of the most the powerful film-makers in the world, was speaking at the London Film Festival (LFF) on Friday about the importance of using real film, as opposed to digital technology. That includes cinemas still having projectors to show, for example, 70mm film.
But there was a bigger problem that the cinema chains needed to address, he said. “For some reason, it has become acceptable to say [to audiences] we are providing this empty room with a TV in it and just watch a film.
“That has to change and if it doesn’t change, forget film, forget digital, if that experience for the audience is not valued … people stop going.”
He said surveys saying younger people did not value going to the cinema were “complete bollocks … the experience has to be something great or of course people don’t want to come”.
Nolan, the director of epics such as Interstellar and Inception, was speaking at a debate on the importance of using real film.
“I have conversations with studio heads and at some point when I’m passionately advocating using film they’ll say ‘at the end of the day doesn’t storytelling trump everything?’
“I say ‘no it doesn’t, otherwise we’d be making radio plays, it would be a lot cheaper.’ ”
Despite the pressure to go digital there were still plenty of directors using film or perhaps returning to it, he said.
Cinemas need to have the projectors to show it and he praised Quentin Tarantino for arranging for 70mm projectors to be installed in 100 cinemas so people could watch his next film The Hateful Eight as it was meant to be seen.
Nolan said the film industry went through periods of technological advancement that sometimes confused what should be a core value – for example, the 1980s fashion of “colourising” black-and-white films.
“I don’t think people are being made aware enough that any digital transfer from film is only ever going to be a translation of the original material … there is always a difference.”
He rejected the economic arguments that are sometimes made to defend the increasing use of digital
“What has crept in is that it has become acceptable for [cinema] theatre owners or distributors to say film is more expensive,” and then for audiences to just accept it without seeing any reduction in ticket prices.
He was joined at the debate by the visual artist Tacita Dean, who is known for working in 16mm and 35mm film.
Dean said it had felt like her artistic medium, film, was being taken away from her in 2011 and she became a founding member of savefilm.org.
“Film was in existential danger,” she said. “It felt like I wouldn’t be able to make my work or even see it.
“In the art world, medium cannot be obsolete and that was the big issue, there has not been a time historically that a medium which has made so much has come under such a threat … I think people have realised and we have turned a corner. It did feel like there was this huge cultural misunderstanding.”
The BFI’s creative director, Heather Stewart, said the institute was the world’s largest lender of film prints but, after it was pointed out that it regularly showed films digitally, she acknowledged it could do better.
The debate was the first of a new LFF Connects series at the festival, now in its 59th year, in which industry figures will explore the future of film and how it engages with other creative industries.
So basically he's claiming that no matter how bad the content (script, acting, direction etc.) of a movie is, it will do well at the box office if it is shot and projected on film. I think we've all shown enough film prints of bad movies to tiny audiences to beg to differ...
And of course the low budget and start-up movie makers to whom the DCP has given the chance to gain access to a theatrical release that didn't exist a decade ago, not to mention re-releases of archival titles that can now be seen in a far better state than was previously possible are not factored in to Nolan's thinking at all. But of course, given the sector of the market he works in, he very much has a vested interest in maintaining high cost barriers to entry, doesn't he?
And as for Stewart's claim that the BFI is the world's largest lender of film prints, I have a very hard time believing that, given how difficult and expensive they make it for anyone to get a print from them (no more difficult and expensive than most of the other FIAF archives, but difficult and expensive enough that even the remaining Hollywood studios that are putting out small quantities of new release prints are probably sending out more on a weekly basis).
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 10-13-2015 02:50 PM
I would be more excited about movie productions using film, particularly 5-perf 65mm and movie theaters showing 70mm, if the movies using the formats actually did some really great work with it.
Last fall I did my part to support Interstellar and its dual 70mm format release, watching it in 5-perf 70mm at LOOK Cinemas in Dallas and then 15-perf 70mm real IMAX in Austin. The movie wasn't really all that great and neither was the cinematography. Some of the 35mm 'scope stuff looked awful. It wasn't something that showed off the true potential of 70mm and the limitations of digital.
The prospect of Quentin Tarantino shooting a western in 70mm seemed exciting at first. But then he chose to use the rarely used Ultra Panavision 70mm process, which is not as sharp as spherical 65mm photography. The problem is compounded by the fact hardly any theaters in the world have screens tailored to the ultra-wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio. Cinemas have been going in reverse, shaping movie screens like TV screens so even a normal 2.39:1 'scope movie gets letter-boxed.
Just about any theater showing The Hateful Eight, either in UP 70mm or freaking digital, will be stuck showing this movie on part of the screen, not all of it. It's going to be a letter-boxed affair everywhere. Some theaters may have it properly masked, but the image isn't going to be as big as it should be. My biggest worry is The Hateful Eight will be a very dialog heavy movie and have much of that dialog stuck in a dark cabin. That's not the sort of material that comes to my mind when I think of something that could be shot in anamorphic ultra-wide 70mm.
quote: The Guardian
Cinema chains need to drastically improve the experience they offer to customers or the next generation of moviegoers will stop going, the film director Christopher Nolan has said.
I think Christopher Nolan is right about this. But the movie industry is positioning itself for implosion on multiple fronts. The quality of the movie-going experience is just one very important angle of it.
Historically commercial movie theaters have always been able to out-do the experience one could get in the home. The difference used to be huge. That's not the case today. Yet theaters are still taking customers for granted on this, as if nothing has changed. 4K is on the verge of becoming mainstream in home theater while most d-cinema theaters are still showing 2K and showing it softly.
Economics are another angle. Prices haven't risen all that much for "standard" d-cinema theaters. But some theater operators are showing dim movies and turning down the sound to TV volume to subconsciously push customers into the much higher priced fake large format houses where the image seems appropriately bright and the surround sound has at least some kick to it. But with a common width screen the letter-boxed presentation and produced-at-the-last-minute sound mix make it feel a little like watching TV at home and have the viewer wondering if this was really worth $16 for the ticket.
There is both good and bad with watching a movie in a theater with an audience. You get the crowd reaction to amplify the drama or comedy in the movie. But you also get all the damned distractions (mobile phone displays lighting up here and there, crying babies, etc.). When you're at home you can hit a pause button if you need to go to the bathroom or get a drink. You're going to miss a few minutes of the movie if you do that in a movie theater.
quote: The Guardian
“I have conversations with studio heads and at some point when I’m passionately advocating using film they’ll say ‘at the end of the day doesn’t storytelling trump everything?’
“I say ‘no it doesn’t, otherwise we’d be making radio plays, it would be a lot cheaper.’ ”
Actually the story (and actors' portrayal of it) really does matter. Hollywood has a huge problem on its hands with all the Save The Cat! formulaic story lines that feel like verbal clip art cobbled together.
Series TV is arguably kicking the feature movie format's ass, particularly TV series made for premium cable or streaming platforms like Netflix. Those TV series have more creative freedom in what they can do with their characters. Viewers can choose to binge watch a season of a TV show in a couple or so sittings as if they're watching a really long movie. Streaming services allow viewers to do this without having to hit any buttons. No commercial breaks, nothing, just the show playing as long as you want to watch it.
One thing I find strange is the advances in technology have allowed a lot of TV series to do a lot more within their limited budgets but Hollywood movie productions have continued to escalate in cost. It's now considered normal for a major Hollywood movie to have a $200 million production budget.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-13-2015 08:48 PM
And also because the latest technology is NOT why most people go to the theater. Nolan is right in that they want something they can't get at home, but for most theatergoers that something is an impressive-looking building, a meal in a nice restaurant before or after the movie, the communal experience of seeing it along with 200 others or whatever. They aren't going to care whether it's 35mm, 70mm, 2K, 4K, VHS or Super 8. Or rather, some might care, but very few will care about that first and foremost.
Nolan has spent the last year claiming that the fact that Interstellar made a healthy profit demonstrates that audiences want film. What it really demonstrates is that a lavishly budgeted and promoted sci-fi epic with big name stars in it is almost guaranteed to make a healthy profit (unless you're Will Smith making a propaganda pic for Scientology, of course!). It wouldn't have been given that budget in the first place if there were any significant danger of it failing.
The Master and Inherent Vice were also released on 70mm at the insistence of a director who is a high-profile champion of the medium. Both films made a significant loss, because they have sprawling, incoherent scripts, so-so acting, they are poorly paced and difficult for the audience to engage with. The fact that they look visually beautiful was not enough to save them. So for Nolan to claim that his movie was primarily a success because it was released on large-format film is problematic, to say the least.
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-13-2015 09:25 PM
Nolan is a fool. There is no bigger waste of time and breath than trying to predict, or stating firmly, what moviegoers will and will not go for. This has been going on for almost seventy years, ever since the first rudimentary television broadcasts. Free TV would kill the movies, movies on TV will kill the movies, HBO would kill the movies, home video would kill the movies, digital would kill the movies, people watching movies on hand held devices will kill the movies. All bullshit predictions. The industry may be a little battered at this point, but it is still alive and it just had a very good summer, showing a mixture of movies shot both on film and on digital but almost exclusively shown digitally. People came and threw their money down because they wanted to see the picture, regardless of the medium.
When Star Wars opens, ask 100 random audience members whether the picture being shot on film affected their decision to see it, or their enjoyment of it, and if they reply “Yes” ask for a cogent explanation of why. I bet you won’t get even a handful.
quote:
still showing 2K and showing it softly . . . But some theater operators are showing dim movies and turning down the sound to TV volume to subconsciously push customers into the much higher priced fake large format houses where the image seems appropriately bright and the surround sound has at least some kick to it.
Here is a question for anyone working actively as a movie projectionist or digital projection technician: does anyone of you ACTUALLY do this, or have you been instructed to do this by theater management? Intentionally defocus a digital image, or run it darkly or at lower volume with the intention of steering audiences to LPF screens? If this is really a thing, then OK, but I do almost all of my major motion picture film going in either the Tri-State New York area, or Los Angeles, or the Toronto area, and I have neither seen it in practice or heard of it from aquaintences still in the industry.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 10-14-2015 03:37 PM
70mm film definitely has the image quality potential to crush anything digital. But the film-maker has to shoot imagery that can show off the difference. Unfortunately recent movies using 70mm, particularly as a campaign to save film production and exhibition, just have not been filming things that way.
Interstellar was far from being Nolan's best film. Much of this movie was dark, dreary and desaturated. The 35mm 'scope material didn't look nearly as sharp as it should have been, desaturated or not. Too much of the IMAX-sourced stuff had very low DOF, thanks to all the dramatic, dreary, low lighting.
The cinematography in The Master was pretty decent, but only if you could get past Paul Thomas Anderson's absolutely baffling choice of pillar-boxing the imagery to 1.85:1. The movie itself was mediocre and over-long.
I saw no point at all for Inherent Vice to have any 70mm blow up prints made. The movie was filmed on 35mm. It's not like this movie was going to be projected on any giant sized screens, where the brighter and more steady image of 70mm would have provided some real benefit. At least it gave the folks at FotoKem some extra practice with 70mm. I didn't like Inherent Vice very much either.
Then we have QT going the Ultra Panavision route even though virtually no theater screens in existence are built to handle the 2.76:1 aspect ratio. The movie threatens to spend most of its length in the dark interiors of a cabin.
I don't know if these guys are truly trying to save film or just killing it from the inside.
quote: Mark Ogden
There is no bigger waste of time and breath than trying to predict, or stating firmly, what moviegoers will and will not go for. This has been going on for almost seventy years, ever since the first rudimentary television broadcasts.
Home TV viewing quality is far different now than it was 70 years ago or even 20 years ago.
In the past 10 years cinemas have converted to digital (with a TV-style letterbox approach to 'scope) and HD viewing became standard in the home. There are barely any quality differences left between watching a movie on a TV screen as opposed to watching it on a commercial theater screen. Then consider all the improvements in store for HDTV technology rolling out the next few years. Only the most high end, laser-equipped theaters are going to keep up with it. Then consider the growing price difference between watching movies at home versus the theater. That has to be cause for at least some concern.
quote: Mike Blakesley
You also have the fact that many people MUST have the latest greatest technology whether they can afford it or not, so if some really great whizbang TV thing comes along then hordes of people will be quick to adopt.
I don't think that's happening quite so much with TV sets. HDTV monitors have become a very commoditized item. Electronics companies have figured how to mass produce them increasingly bigger, better and thinner yet at more affordable price points. Some of these sets aren't built to last, so you have a replacement cycle that's not much different from personal computers. There are some people who simply must have the latest, greatest thing. But it's going to take a while for 4K UHDTV sets to replace all the 1080p TV sets out there. Most people will replace an aging HDTV set because something is wrong with it or it doesn't support some needed feature.
quote: Mike Blakesley
The theatrical industry has always been a slow-evolving industry not necessarily because we are resistant to change, but because change is so freaking expensive.
The movie distributors aren't doing commercial theaters any favors with all this digital technology. Between the movie distributors and electronics companies they've just about eliminated the image quality quality barrier between commercial theaters and home theater. Going forward it's going to be easier and far cheaper for home viewers to buy 4K TV sets that support REC 2020, HDR, Dolby Vision, etc. than the average commercial movie theater. Immersive audio (Atmos, DTS-X) is already much more accessible to home theater nuts than commercial theater operators.
The least thing the movie studios could have done is retain some kind of picture quality level for commercial theaters that was still clearly better than what one could see on the average HDTV screen. They didn't do that. They couldn't even manage to do 'scope right in digital. They had to letterbox it just like on a damned TV screen.
quote: Mark Ogden
Here is a question for anyone working actively as a movie projectionist or digital projection technician: does anyone of you ACTUALLY do this, or have you been instructed to do this by theater management? Intentionally defocus a digital image, or run it darkly or at lower volume with the intention of steering audiences to LPF screens? If this is really a thing, then OK, but I do almost all of my major motion picture film going in either the Tri-State New York area, or Los Angeles, or the Toronto area, and I have neither seen it in practice or heard of it from aquaintences still in the industry.
Whenever you sit close enough or walk up close enough to the screen (maybe at the end credits or during a bathroom break) can you see a pixel grid at all? Or is it kind of blurry? A bunch of these movie screens are significantly bigger than a 14' X 48' billboard. But 2048 or 4096 pixels stretched across that doesn't equal a high dpi rating at all, certainly not high enough to hide a pixel grid if the projection system is set up and focused as well as possible.
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 10-14-2015 07:59 PM
No Bobby, no one is missing the point. For a long time now, you've been insinuating that theatre operators have been intentionally de-focusing digital projectors to hide a "pixel grid" (just above, you hurled another accusation about them intentionally dimming the picture and lowering the sound of standard presentations to drive people to PLF screens. Neither I, or apparently anyone else on the forum, has ever heard of this, I've never seen it mentioned once). The point is: your claim is INTENT. You add:
quote: Bobby Henderson
certainly not high enough to hide a pixel grid if the projection system is set up and focused as well as possible.
Even if you focus your projector to within an inch of its life, is there a projection lens in the world that can resolve a 17um DMD point source, magnify it thousands of times and still render the edges sharply enough to detect a fixed grid pattern? Not likely, but if you sit back from the screen a bit and take the image as a whole there is enough resolution and acutance to accept the image as sharply focused. Because there is no such thing anywhere as a projection lens that does not to some extant blur the image, all of motion picture projection from day one has relied on this phenomena. BUT this does not . . .
hold on a minute . . you like boldface type . . .
BUT THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT IT IS BEING DONE INTENTIONALLY TO HIDE THINGS THAT CANNOT BE RESOLVED ANYWAY.
Now before you bring up the whole "blocky credit letters" thing: let us stipulate that at some point things become large enough to be more sharply resolved: your film grain, for instance, which on the kind of crappy 35mm release print you're likely to get out there in East Jesus starts out at about 30-35um (although if you walk right up to the screen as you suggest I do, that's not going to look that sharp either, for the same reasons above). In this fashion, if you take a letter from a credit roll, spread it out over four or five micro-mirrors, or pixels, or whatever you want to call them, then yes, you may detect the very beginnings of a jagged pattern, especially on a less than 2K series one projector, but it will require just that kind of spread-out tangental image, a worst-case scenario if you will, to see. I don't see it that much anymore, haven't in years.
But I still have never seen "grids" of pixels on a screen no matter how close i've stood and I have never heard of anyone INTENTIONALLY defocusing a projected digital image to hide fixed pattern issues, no more than I have heard of anyone running the other game that you claim is going on, about the PLF screens.
I would be happy for anyone who is an experienced digital projection technician (not you Bobby) to advise me if I am in error on this, and I would be interested in hearing how prevalent a practice this is.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 10-15-2015 09:35 AM
quote: Mark Ogden
Even if you focus your projector to within an inch of its life, is there a projection lens in the world that can resolve a 17um DMD point source, magnify it thousands of times and still render the edges sharply enough to detect a fixed grid pattern?
So, basically the blurry imagery I'm seeing on that 70' wide screen is as good as it gets? It's that way by design? At 840" across this is hardly even resolving 1 dot per inch, much less the 2-3 dots per inch it should be showing. A theater might as well not bother with a 4K upgrade or any of the high dollar laser based stuff coming down the pipe line if d-cinema optics are really that limited.
Your claim "crappy 35mm release print" grain is double that 17um size (30-35um) suggests the print would only yield half the resolution of d-cinema, making the film image barely compare to a 16x9 widescreen 480p DVD.
All I know is when this particular theater was showing 'scope movies on 35mm film (via a very good Kinoton projector) they looked a damned sight better than they do in d-cinema. I could see the grain structure on screen if I walked close enough, and the image quality was better than any damned 480p or 720p ballpark zone.
Meanwhile in the electronics stores, it's pretty damned easy to tell the image quality difference between a 1080p HD and 2160p UHD TV screen.
quote: Mark Ogden
hold on a minute . . you like boldface type . . .
Cram your bold faced type, Mark. I wasn't yelling at you, or personally insulting/attacking you. I hope you didn't have a stroke while indulging in your all caps fury.
On the sound side of things, maybe it's different for you at the theaters you visit in NY and LA, Mark. That doesn't change what I'm experiencing at theaters in this part of the country -a bunch of theaters in Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado.
Even before Cinemark began its conversion to digital they were playing games with the audio in their theaters. You would get some loud surround sound if you paid extra to see a movie in the IMAX house. But it's TV set volume in all their standard priced rooms. A few months ago my girlfriend and I had tickets to watch Kingsmen: The Secret Service in Harkins' Atmos-equipped Cine Capri house in Oklahoma City, but the movie got bumped to a lesser house at the last minute to make way for 50 Shades of Gray. Same damned problem. Wimpy surround sound with hardly any dynamics and barely loud enough to make out the dialog. We watched Jurassic World in one of the smaller houses at the Warren Moore theater. This room was THX certified and wired for 7.1, yet it had the same very toned down audio.
For all the advantages in audio that d-cinema has over 35mm release prints, I'm not seeing these theaters take full advantage of it. 24-bit uncompressed LPCM audio is a hell of a lot better than any lossy format on 35mm. Yet I haven't heard any d-cinema theater around here come even close to matching the kind of audio quality I heard at the GCC Northpark 1-2 theater back when it was running. And that theater was stuck playing movies in lossy Dolby Digital and DTS for most of my visits there.
My theory is it costs more money in terms of sound system maintenance to run a movie theater sound system the way a lot of multiplex theaters did when they first got digital sound in the 1990s. You wear out speakers and amps faster playing the sound mix with the reference level of bombast. It's more profitable to play the movie at TV speaker volume. If the customer wants some chest thumping surround sound, make him pay extra for it in the Lie-MAX house.
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