Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Chris Nolan Speaks

AICN has the transcript. Some interesting stuff. Most tantalizing insight:

He doesn’t have email or cell phone. “It gives me a little more time to think.”

Makes you love him all the more. Also, he has reservations about 3D at the technical level:

“On a technical level I think it’s fascinating. On an experiential level I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating. The truth of it is, when you watch a film you’re looking at 16 foot-lamberts. When you watch it through any of the conventional 3-D processes you get about 3 foot-lamberts. It’s a massive difference.

You’re not that aware of it because once you’re in that world your eye compensates, but having struggled for years to get theaters to get up to the proper brightness you’re now sticking polarized filters into this thing and we’re going back worse than we were.”

- Also from a shooting standpoint, Nolan has even more issues with 3-D: “It requires shooting on video, if you mask it to 2.40 you’re only getting 800 or 900 lines of resolution. You have to use a beam-splitter.”

- Nolan doesn’t use use zoom lenses, only primes, because the image quality isn’t sharp enough on the long end of a zoom, so the idea of shooting a whole film through a beam-splitter doesn’t appeal to him. “There are enormous compromises, in other words.”

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Zoom lenses? Primes? Beam splitters? I thought it was all ball bearings, damnit.

Steve Sailer said...

"He doesn’t have email or cell phone."

But I bet his personal assistant(s) have them.

Super-achievers like Nolan often have a secretary (often older than themselves) who has a worked for them for a decade or more who knows their business as well as they do -- a non-Gwyneth Paltrow-version of Pepper Potts.