American Cinematographer - June 2009 - 82

some filmmakers — Tony Scott is an example — who want the flexibility to rework the look of movies they shot 10 or 15 years ago because their sensibilities have changed. For Tony, we remastered The Hunger and Top Gun, and he changed a lot of stuff. We took the IP and scanned the untimed negative and made comparisons, and we found it was easier to work off an untimed negative than the timed IP when Tony wanted to take the look in different directions. A timed IP is limiting to some degree. If Scott hadn’t wanted to change the look, would the IP have been sufficient? Sonnenfeld: It’s easier for the colorist to work from because the color decisions are incorporated into it, and yes, there is consistency, but in the digital process, you have to hit every scene. Just because it’s consistent and it’s an IP, that doesn’t mean the same 10 scenes will always look the same with one correction. What about the argument that cutting neg is limiting in terms of future deliverables? Bailey: I feel that a movie, like a novel, is an artifact; it’s not 500,000 feet of raw data to be repurposed at will. On any production, the director makes certain decisions about a performance, the actors make certain choices, and the cinematographer makes certain choices, and that becomes what the film is. Those are the decisions I made, and it’s the statement I wanted to make. Sonnenfeld: But as you know, John, there are cinematographers who want to come in here and put 15 power windows on everything. Bailey: And that has been detrimental to the look of a lot of movies! I think that not cutting neg is a double-edged sword. You don’t lose the frames, but you’ve essentially imprisoned the original film — what was theatrically released — in 1,000foot rolls of film, and if you shot 500,000 feet of original camera negative, all of that has to be stored. That mandates a huge physical archive. And 82 June 2009 all these digital masters we’re talking about — 4K, 2K, 1K — comprise a huge amount of information that has to not only be stored properly but also migrated to new formats as they evolve. And when things are stored on tape, or on hard drives, which are a bigger problem, they have a tendency to sort of corrupt and disappear. One of the first long-form things I did on video was The Anniversary Party [AC July ’01], which I shot in the PAL format. For a long time, [co-directors] Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason-Leigh considered shooting Super 16mm instead of video, and today, even though I’m pleased with the movie, I regret that we didn’t shoot film, because if we had, we’d have an archival original camera negative. What will happen to our original PAL tapes, I don’t know. Sonnenfeld: I recently remastered a big movie that’s about six years old, and two of the reels couldn’t be recovered from the DTF [tapes] because the tape just wouldn’t play. We had to re-create the roll by scanning the negative and conforming [it]. Bailey: And if the film hadn’t earned $100 million at the box office, would there even be all that negative? What happens if the negative wasn’t cut, and you have to dig through 400,000 or 500,000 feet of film stored in 1,000-foot rolls? Who’s going to pay for that? Ansel Adams burned most of his negatives because he felt his creative intent was in the print, not the negative. Do you see a kind of corollary in the film world? Bailey: I saw a wonderful show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that had some of Ansel Adams’ key images from Yosemite; they showed the evolution of his prints from the so-called vintage print done at the time to the print he made right before he died. There were maybe five or six versions of the same image, and it’s amazing how different they were. I understand that kind of evolution. Every artist has a right to do that, but Adams was an artist who created an image and had control over what he wanted to do every step of the way. I don’t think very many filmmakers have that kind of control. Certainly, cinematographers don’t. It’s only recently that studios, in their enlightened selfinterest, have understood the importance of calling the cinematographer in to supervise some of these new iterations of their work. I know I’m on the losing side of this. I just hope I can finish my career in the photochemical realm as much as possible, because I know what’s coming, and aesthetics and quality are not driving those decisions — it’s monetary. Studios want nothing more than to eliminate these bulky, old film prints that need to be transported, and the faster digital cinema comes in, the cheaper it will be to deliver the product. Sonnenfeld: That’s why it’s so important to work with the right people. Every DI is different; this isn’t a business where generic work will do. You have to really understand what the hell is going on. A lot of film schools don’t teach enough about the things we’re discussing. Filmmaking is like any other craft: if you want to learn it, you’d better be prepared to learn everything about it. If you want to be a great filmmaker, you have to understand postproduction. You’re going to get torched if you don’t. I

American Cinematographer - June 2009

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