 |
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.
Share:
