DV may be the format making headlines, but many experienced moviemakers aren’t ready to give up on film just yet. While many are heralding HD as the medium of choice, a handful of moviemakers sat down for a Kodak-sponsored panel with Pat Thomson, former editor of The Independent and frequent contributor to such publications as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, New York Daily News, The Village Voice and American Cinematographer to discuss the renewed interest in 16mm film—and Super 16 in particular.

With Super 16 films such as Raising Victor Vargas and A Mighty Wind recently in theaters, indie auteur Victor Nuñez (Ulee’s Gold, Ruby in Paradise), producers Lemore Syvan (Casa de los Babys, Personal Velocity) and Robert May (The Station Agent, Stevie), cinematographer Oliver Bokelberg (The Station Agent, A Walk on the Moon) and television director-producer-DP Peter Schnall (“Air Force One,” “The White House”) discuss their format of choice.

Pat Thomson (MM): I’d like to start with Lemore. Personal Velocity was shot on digital. The film looked good, Ellen Kuras won the Cinematography Award at Sundance and you got distribution through United Artists. It had to have been a happy experience. So why shoot Super 16 on all your most recent projects?

Lemore Syvan (LS): Well, the question came up every day when we were shooting Personal Velocity: why can’t we just shoot this on Super 16? But Personal Velocity was designed for video. The way the movie was born was by a mandate that was given to us by InDigEnt, which we all know is a company that makes movies on digital. And we were very happy to be allowed to make a film and tell our story. The movie was designed from day one for digital video, so the script was designed that way. I had to produce it around all of that, and that’s why it was a good experience.

Ellen had experience beforehand with shooting digital video… There was a lot of preparation having to do with the camera and what we had to do with it in order for the film to look the way we wanted it to look. But we weren’t really trying to make it look like film.

It was not easy, even though we were planning for it. But my conclusion after that, even though it was a great experience, [was that] if I had my choice, I wouldn’t go back to that format again.

MM: Victor, you have been faithful to film from the beginning—even while you were working with modest budgets. I know that Ruby in Paradise was shot for well under $1 million….

VN: It was around $350,000.

MM: Wow! Ulee’s Gold was, I think, $2.6 million. You’re shooting on film with an independent budget. So were you ever tempted to stray?

VN: Well, when I started, video really wasn’t a viable alternative. I guess I sort of had a sense that I was always going to be on the edge of things and I kind of liked Super 16. I have always enjoyed the sort of technical side of filmmaking as a kind of balance against the emotional angst you get into and it just sort of evens the keel. So Super 16 was always a very good alternative.

One of the things that has been interesting over the years is that people have approached Super 16 for two reasons that are almost contradictory. One is we want a very self-conscious, raw, grainy look. We want it to be a focused, shaking camera… It’s always laughable when the Hollywood filmmakers shoot everything in 35 or 65 and then copy it over to 16 to try to make it look “more real,” whatever that means. The other way, and my choice, was sort of like yours: it was the most economical, practical way to get a quality image that I had available, and it has remained that way up to this point.

MM: Robert, I know that The Station Agent originally came to you as a 35mm project. You considered HD but ended up with Super 16. Can you walk us through that decision-making process?

Robert May (RM): Sure. It came to us in 35, as you said, and we knew Oliver [Bokelberg] was going to be involved in the project…. It came back to us in different budget formats, and we very seriously explored DV—especially after the success of Personal Velocity at Sundance.

We took a really close look at Personal Velocity in comparison to what the story was for The Station Agent, and it is a much different story. There are a lot of exteriors and it’s just a beautiful, flowing story. Personal Velocity was very interior-intensive and it was clear that there was a purpose for it—for DV. But we didn’t feel that DV would suit our purpose as well. And so the other alternative, other than 35 of course, was 16. But the factors were really the beauty and flow of the story of The Station Agent. We felt that it just needed to be on film, and yet we had budgetary constraints.

MM: Did HD come into the equation?

RM: Not really, because we felt it was too crisp and it just didn’t have that depth… The other thing about HD that we learned is that, compared to Super 16, it is not that inexpensive. I mean, it doesn’t give you a budgetary advantage, whereas DV kind of does. But we also learned that it’s not what it appears to be, because of all the other problems associated with DV… I think [that DV is] a great way for films to get made, but I think that it needs to be for certain types of films or stories.

Oliver Bokelberg (OB): DV didn’t really make sense for this film. We were out in the sunlight, using wide shots out in New Jersey. DV has its merits, and I think if you look at what the Danish did with their thought models, I think it’s brilliant. But they’re shooting in the wintertime where it never gets light outside; they stay in the dark a lot. They are very close and very personal [films] with brilliant results—stuff that we probably couldn’t achieve with our equipment, although 16 is small enough for us to kind of lug it around. But this one was definitely not DV.

MM: And let’s not forget documentaries. Can you speak to that, Peter? The majority of documentaries nowadays, certainly in the U.S., are produced in video. What do you say to documentary moviemakers who come up to you and say, ‘Why are you shooting in Super 16?’

Peter Schnall (PS): Well, in the documentary world I think there are more documentaries being produced now for television than when I started. So film was the choice back when I started shooting docs, and as more and more docs were being produced for cable networks, the budgets shrunk. Video got better. And it seemed to be an easy choice. And then people started to look at the shows we were producing, and other companies—like mine—were saying, “Are you shooting in film because you have a bigger budget? Are you shooting in film because it’s so special?” I think it’s a little bit of both.

When you shoot on film, it does cost you a little more. However, when a producer comes back from the field with 70 or 90 hours of videotape, that is a major problem for a film that is basically going to end up being 46 minutes long. It’s a very serious problem. I think there is a misnomer that if you just turn on the camera you will find a story; that is not always true. As a matter of fact, that is very much the opposite…

A good budget needs to look at both film and video, and use them for exactly what they are, and that is: film is beautiful and captures light like no other format that we have ever seen. Yet at the same time, because of shrinking budgets, it doesn’t make sense to shoot interviews on film, for example. It makes more sense to do your interviews on tape. So what we’re doing is shooting most of our films using Super 16, doing video interviews and intermixing them.

But again, one should not dismiss what the video cameras and the change of the video formats have done for documentaries. We still produce video documentaries. The Mini DVs have allowed us to journey into places and with people in situations where the film camera probably wouldn’t have worked. Yet at the same time, I think that one can still look at Super 16 and shooting on film for any documentary on almost any budget—the budgets we have range from say $250,000 to $500,000.