Orson Welles once wrote that the central fact that distinguishes the filmmaker from other artists is that “he can never afford his own tools.” Never say never, Orson. Today you can shoot a movie on a digital video camera for less than $2,000. Throw in an additional $1,500 for an iMac DV computer and you can do all your own editing, special effects and titles. Look at it this way: an hour of video costs about $10 to $20. A minute of film costs roughly $100 to shoot, develop and print, according to Jason Kliot, one of the founders of Blow Up Pictures, which aims to produce digital movies for “under a million dollars.” For Kliot, the esthetic advantages of DV are clear: “The amount of risk you can take as a filmmaker is inversely proportional to your budget.”
Blow Up was announced at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. A year later it has made four films–one of which, Miguel Arteta’s “Chuck & Buck,” is in the dramatic competition. There were, in fact, twice as many digitally shot movies as last year submitted to the festival (about 300), amounting to 10 percent of all submissions. Ten or 11 were chosen. This week at Sundance another new company devoted solely to digital filmmaking will be unveiled. Called InDigEnt (for “independent digital entertainment”), it plans to finance 10 movies, all made for a mere $100,000 per picture. And it has got big-time talent lined up. Directors such as Steven Soderbergh (“Out of Sight”) and Carl Franklin (“One False Move”) have signed up, and Ethan Hawke has already finished filming his first movie, “The Last Word on Paradise,” which he shot in 16 days at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
Hawke is one of the digital True Believers. “It’s gonna raise the talent bar of filmmaking,” insists Hawke, who doesn’t buy the conventional wisdom that it will unleash a tidal wave of incompetent amateurs. “It’ll make filmmaking more like painting or the novel, in which case you need to be immensely more talented to do it. This is going to let the future James Joyces work in this medium.” Former studio director Bernard Rose (“Immortal Beloved”) is another born-again digitalist. He’s promoting his first video project, “ivansxtc,” on his Web site filmisdead.com. Unlike the other movies, this one was shot on HD (high-definition video), which has twice the resolution of traditional video. “The advantages are so many,” he proclaims. “They start multiplying exponentially when you start with the big one: you don’t need to light it.” This is because video is so light-sensitive. No lights, he explains, means no electricians, grips, makeup department, generators. Digital is going to mean speedy productions, small crews, low budgets. And the small cameras are so inconspicuous, filmmakers can shoot on the street without a location permit.
The trouble with most video, however, is that it’s video. It’s a colder, shallower image than film, less flexible, with a narrower range of emotional nuances. But with the right subject, video can work like a charm –the seminal model is “The Celebration,” the award-winning 1998 Danish film that used the immediacy of cheap video images to its own advantage. And then came “The Blair Witch Project.” Though it was not shot with a digital camera, the fact that a movie that used so much video footage could beguile a mass audience gave hope to low-end filmmakers everywhere, and made the studios tremble.
But the revolution has yet to prevail. “This is not a form of moviemaking that anyone thinks is superior to film,” cautions Geoff Gilmore. “This isn’t going to take the place of film.” Gilmore is codirector of the Sundance Film Festival, which one might assume to be the Holy Land of the digital future. But Gilmore thinks the digital invasion has been “overhyped. It’s all in its nascent stage. There is a great deal of fear attached to the stigma of working in video. They are worried about getting distribution.”
Still, the digital movement is already transforming independent filmmaking. (It’s become the stand-ard for documentary filmmakers.) Directors such as Spike Lee, Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier are working in the new medium. And the quality of the more expensive HD video will soon be able to rival that of film. What are the implications for Hollywood? Why is it using digital technology only for special effects and editing? There are several reasons that most studio heads think the transition from film to digital is at least 10 years away. Digital movies require digital projectors. “The big snag,” says just-departed Disney Studios chairman Joe Roth, “is, who pays to retrofit the theaters? The theater owners are loath to spend it. The studios are not allowed to collectively decide to do it.” The price tag could add up to $3 billion or $4 billion. Movies, of course, could be downloaded from the Internet–but is that how anyone is going to want to see the “Titanics” of the future? Few major directors have shown interest in abandoning film. “If you can still get paid a lot of money to make movies the old way, why do it this way?” asks Roth.
George Lucas, however, is hot on the digital scent: Sony has designed a camera, and Panavision special lenses, for him to use on his next project. If one studio leads the industry into the digital future it will be Sony, and to figure out why, you have only to ponder the Sony name. Sony makes most of the products involved in HD video moviemaking. It’s synergy like this that explains why the Japanese company bought into the volatile movie business in the first place. “We’re the one place that is vertically integrated technologically,” says Yair Landau, Sony Pictures’ executive vice president for strategic planning.
Sony is the first studio to finance a digital movie–Mike Figgis’s just-completed “Time Code 2000.” The movie cost 5 percent of a normal studio budget and was shot in only nine days. Actually, it was shot 18 times in nine days. It stars Holly Hunter, Salma Hayek, Kyle MacLachlan and Jeanne Tripplehorn, all of whom improvised their lines. Figgis (“Leaving Las Vegas”) wanted to make a dark comedy about Hollywood filmmaking that would run as long as the tape cams in the DV cameras–93 minutes. The movie was shot on four cameras running simultaneously, each following different characters. When the movie is released in March, the audience will watch all four threads at once, on a screen divided into quadrants.
Is this a glimpse of the future, or just a one-of-a-kind experiment? In 2010 will all dramas and risky projects be relegated to video while film is reserved for the $200 million, big-event studio spectacles? Will a TV esthetic replace the subtler nuances of celluloid? Will we see an outpouring of bold new talents in this new, more democratic medium, or will we all drown in a tidal wave of mediocrity? These questions and even bigger ones (will digitally altered actors replace the real ones?) will be decided in the next two decades. All we know for sure is what Al Jolson promised when the talkies first arrived: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
