The Hollywood Reporter has released the third video in their annual series of Oscar roundtables, this time giving the cinematographers a chance to speak. Featured in this roundtable are Barry Ackroyd (Captain Phillips), Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave), Bruno Delbonnel (Inside Llewyn Davis), Stuart Dryburgh (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and Phedon Papamichael (Nebraska).
One of the most interesting subjects covered is the idea of digital vs. film after it’s brought up that many of them actually shot their respective movies on film. Delbonnel, who’s shot films ranging from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to Amelie, gets things started with this:
What’s annoying me is, they are pushing toward digital but we have no choice. And I like to have the choice of saying, “I think this movie should be done on film. On Super 8, or whatever.” But I have no choice. The choice is talking about what we want to achieve. And what I want to achieve is related to the script and the story, and then to where the director wants to direct it with the actors, with the production design. They always compare us to painters, which I think is wrong. But there is a major difference between water color and oil painting. So I want to be able to say, “Oh, this is the thing that I could do with water color instead of oil painting.” On Tim Burton’s movie Big Eyes, we wanted to shoot on film. And we shot in Vancouver, but the Vancouver and Toronto labs shut down, and we had to ship everything to L.A. and it cost a fortune. Going through customs and shipping and X-ray — we don’t want that. So ultimately, Tim decided to go with digital because it’s a low-budget movie.
Bobbit adds, “I don’t understand why film has to die for digital to succeed” an Dryburgh adds this interesting bit, “[In digital] you start seeing lines on people’s faces that really aren’t there. I find myself using diffusion filters that I haven’t used in 20 years, just to be kinder to the faces of the people I’m photographing. And it’s weird: It’s not because you’re trying to make them better than they are in person; you’re actually fighting the tendency of the digital camera to make them look worse.”
You can watch the full conversation directly below and if you haven’t yet checked out my updated predictions, you can click here for my Best Cinematography category where three of the men in this video are currently in my top five.
