Neil Calloway takes Christopher Nolan to task for his insistence on the film projection of Interstellar…
I like Christopher Nolan. Of all the British born but partly raised in America directors who are currently working in the sci-fi/fantasy genre he is definitely in the top two. Yes, his films may be like a house of cards that look great but only stand up to the slightest scrutiny, but for those couple of hours I’m in the cinema watching his films he has me all the way. Eschewing a second unit director, everything you see in his films he shot, which is impressive. He uses more practical effects than you probably imagine, too. I walk through Gotham Courthouse on the way to work every morning, which is never not exciting.
There is something admirable, also, about his refusal to join the 21st Century. Famously, he does not own a mobile phone nor does he have an email account. I bet his assistant has both, though. So I’m a fan, but…
He is wrong, however, is in his insistence that cinemas who still use use traditional film projectors show Interstellar (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway) before it is sent to theatres who have switched to digital projection. It is one thing to shoot on film, be that 35mm, 70mm or IMAX, it is quite another to insist that your film be shown on a print. It’s alright if you’re Nolan, who has the backing of Paramount who can afford the price of film prints, but not if you’re a small independent film-maker without the backing of a studio.
Each print you “strike” costs about a grand, a not inconsiderable sum if you want more than a few cinemas to show your film at the same time. Take Lilting, the wonderful little British film released earlier this summer. It opened on 28 screens. You think the production company could afford that many prints? Digital is the only way to take advantage of the buzz that accompanies a film’s release. If they’d have shelled out for physical prints that toured the country, it would take weeks for the film to reach the provinces and by the time it’s got to the Light House in Wolverhampton the print would be scratched and jumping all over the place.
Here’s the other thing about digital projection; it preserves the image exactly as the director intended. A couple of years ago I went to see the 70mm print of The Master that was showing in Leicester Square. Over priced ticket duly purchased, I was told that there was a scratch on the print, and if I wanted I could get a refund as long as I requested it before twenty minutes of the film had elapsed. In reality I hardly noticed the scratch, but that simply wouldn’t have happened if the film had been projected digitally. At the London Film Festival in 2009 I watched the Australian drama Blessed in a print that had Spanish subtitles as it had come from the San Sebastian film festival. Blessed is a superb film (well worth checking out, if you haven’t) but I could not help but think they should have screened a digital print instead. If the only print of your film in Europe has Spanish subtitles, are you really going to get a distribution deal? Blessed never did, sadly, and took years to emerge on DVD. Digital distribution gets your film out to whoever has the equipment to show it, in the way you intended. If it’s not quite as good as film projection just yet – provided you have a blemish free print – then we should be working to improve digital projection, not just going backwards and relying on film. There’s a reason I mentioned Lilting; Nolan’s gimmick (and it is a gimmick; it’ll only be for a few days, as Paramount won’t want to harm the all-important opening weekend box office) means that Interstellar will open on 240 screens. Lilting’s budget was £120,000. He’s spending twice the budget of a great British independent film to make himself seem like the last bastion of analogue film-making. That’s a waste. That’s money that could be used on other films that need the distribution Interstellar will get anyway.
I’d go so far as to say directors shouldn’t be shooting on film anymore. You can bet Nolan’s editor cuts his films on a computer and any special effects he uses aren’t added by being painted on frame by frame by artists in some studio workshop. Nolan would kill to be the director Michael Mann is, and he’s been using digital to brilliant effect for ten years now.
I’m a bit of a technophobe, too. I still buy CDs, despite owning a Kindle I still buy books, I’ve only just bought a smartphone, but Nolan is just being wilfully hardheaded about the advance of technology. I’ll go and see Interstellar, and I’ll probably go and see it in IMAX, just as I did Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, but will I notice if it’s a digital print instead of an actual film running through the projector? Only if the film is scratched.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
Originally published October 19, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
