Film vs. Digital: Can there ever be a winner?
Anyone can make a movie now. The rise of digital as a legitimate film medium and the availability of affordable, high-quality cameras have democratized the industry. A great story and relatively decent production values is all a picture needs to gain recognition — Sundance indie hit, Tangerine, was shot entirely on an iPhone. The manner by which it was shot has become irrelevant to audiences as the advances in technology have virtually eliminated any perceptible differences between film and digital productions. However the debate in Hollywood wages on with a handful of purists fighting to keep celluloid alive. The reality is the transition was rapid and today the majority of filmmaking no longer actually involves film.
The digital insurgency
In 1999, George Lucas incited the digital revolution by including digital footage in Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace and leveraging it as the first movie to be presented via digital projectors. The seamless blending of the two formats convinced him to shoot the remaining sequels exclusively in digital video, as well as any other picture he made going forward. In 2002, Lucas released Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (though Robert Rodriguez‘s Once Upon a Time in Mexico was technically the first film shot entirely in high-def digital a year earlier). In the Keanu Reeves-produced documentary, Side by Side, Lucas describes the backlash he experienced. “They got up and had a big meeting, saying that l was the devil incarnate, that l was gonna destroy the industry, that l was gonna destroy all their jobs,” he says. The quality was so good, no one even wanted to believe he used digital and insisted he was a liar.
Fast-forward about a decade and The Wolf of Wall Street becomes the first major picture distributed entirely in digital, reducing costs to less than a third. As a result, the studios subsidized the upgrade to digital projectors in big, first-run cinemas since their savings on distribution would be substantial. Conversely, art house and independent theatres were left to shoulder the expense alone. Yet by 2013, 90 percent of the world’s movie screens were digital. Currently even most celluloid is transferred to digital during the editing stage, which also supports the growth of streaming services and video-on-demand.
Quentin Tarantino has equated digital presentation to the death of cinema and watching TV in public. Unsurprisingly, he’s found a way to bypass digital projectors — at least temporarily. He’s successfully sold the concept of a road show for his latest picture, The Hateful Eight, during which it will play exclusively in 70 mm for the first two weeks of its release. In addition, he’s recently confirmed the wide release will be six minutes shorter because he’s modified some of the shots meant specifically for the larger format. Tarantino reasons, it could be “awesome in the bigness of 70 mm, but sitting on your couch maybe it’s not so awesome.”
Another reality of the new digital world is the pressure to shoot by consensus. With film it was necessary to trust the director of photography when he positioned the camera and said it was going to look fantastic. Cinematographer John Mathieson confirms, “That level of craftsmanship… 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.” Fincher concedes, “A director of photography looks at color and composition and angles and all of these things…” But now directors, actors and studio heads don’t have to wait to see the dailies the next morning — digital shooting allows them to see everything as it happens. For Rodriguez, it’s one of the medium’s top assets. “[Film was] like painting with the lights off,” he tells Reeves in Side by Side. But not everyone agrees. Charles Herzfeld, Technicolor NY’s senior vice-president of sales and marketing counters, “The process of shooting film was the director of photography’s art and secret. And today, the cinematographer is monitored on a digital shoot, and everything that they’re doing can be seen, criticized, and questioned.” French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel agrees, noting the democratic process is causing films to lose “consistency in their look and feel.”
You can’t stop the future
But at the end of the day, one has to acknowledge that the majority of motion pictures use a blend of digital and film — the split often being the former for night and the latter for day — and an increasing number are shot entirely in digital. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema thinks the debate is pointless as it assumes “there is a “better” and a “worse,” that there is a “winner” and a “loser.”” When Indiewire asked a group of cinematographers at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival whether they thought the shift from film to digital was good or bad, the consensus was that digital is just another tool in their tool belt and the decision should be based on which format will best suit the story they are trying to tell. Presently, the only practical way to shoot native 3D (the best looking kind) is digitally. This reality pushed James Cameron and Martin Scorsese to test the waters when they developed Avatar and Hugo respectively, both of which won Oscars for best cinematography. On the other hand, IMAX’s high-resolution is still a film-only product.
But with most film labs shuttering their doors worldwide and Kodak only keeping its L.A. facility open after a group of filmmakers lobbied them, Tom Rothman, chairman CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, perceptively declared in the 2012 digital video documentary, “in five years, film will be the exception.”
