
Cannes Interview: Christopher Nolan on a new “unrestored” 70mm print of “2001” - prismatic
https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-christopher-nolan/
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cmiles74
The comparison to paintings in an art gallery struck me as the most compelling
argument for viewing film in a theater, rather than a digital copy in a nice
viewing room. That is the medium the art was made in, therefore there's an
intrinsic value in viewing it in the way the artist intended it to be viewed.
I hadn't thought if it that way and he's right: no one tries to pass off a
print as being the same thing as the actual painting.

I also found Nolan's rejection of the term "consume" interesting. Here's a
term that the industry has been really pushing, likely to keep in line with
the view that watching a film is a single use thing, and he dismisses it out
of hand.

~~~
dcwca
The analogy of seeing an original painting in a gallery vs. looking at a print
is appealing, however, I can't help think that we're comparing apples and
oranges here: paintings are 3d objects and prints are 2d reproductions. All
image projections are reproductions, and the colour and textural properties
inherent in photochemical film processing are subtle and trivial to reproduce
digitally.

I'm fairly certain Nolan himself could be fooled in a double blind test
between 4k digital and a 70mm (assuming he didn't oversee the transfers haha).

This is more about _knowing_ how the picture was produced, and that it was
reproduced faithfully, and the excitement that comes from that for those who
care. The placebo effect is real :)

~~~
frostburg
No, it's pretty easy to tell on a big enough screen. What's impossible to
distinguish in a double blind test is FLAC vs good lossy compression or high
end reel-to-reel against high end digital.

~~~
dcwca
So then does the argument come down to a question of bitrate? Can we push
digital projections beyond the point of human visual discernment, like we have
with audio?

~~~
frostburg
Yes, but I don't see many 16K projectors around.

~~~
Demiurge
That is not how high the cinema ever gets. The focus plane never completely
aligns, the backgrounds shift, the projector vibrates and its lenses have edge
artifacts. The scanable 16k film would look way better in Oculus VR than
reprojected.

~~~
frostburg
I wouldn't use the optics of commercial VR headsets as any kind of quality
benchmark.

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Jaruzel
After reading that, I have a new respect for Nolan as an auteur. He clearly
believes in the art of film-making, and not just throwing out big-ticket
movies. I've much preferred his more cerebral work such as The Prestige and
Intersteller, over big ticket stuff like his Batman Trilogy (and I'm a HUGE
Batman fan). I hope he continues down this artistic path.

~~~
nradov
Personally I found Interstellar to be more pretentious, preachy, and illogical
than cerebral. I mean I can suspend disbelief for SciFi tropes like time
travel, but don't ask me to believe that a single uncurable pathogen could
infect every staple food crop.

Not one of his better efforts.

~~~
bloopernova
There are dozens of us!

I agree, I really didn't get drawn in by Interstellar much at all. Although I
only watched it on a home "theatre" and not an imax blow-your-mind
"experience", so maybe I missed out on something that the bigger screen would
have given me?

It's just weird that a rapidly-falling-back-to-agrarian society scrabbling for
resources would also be able to secretly maintain such a high-technology base.
I was waiting for a 1%-esque hidden society to be revealed leeching off the
masses or something.

I'm not sure what the agrarian bit meant, I felt like it could be dropped
without losing much of the film. I would have believed a dying Earth with
every effort thrown into trying to colonize Mars, but Martians get cancer and
the colony keeps failing or something. Then we discover this wormhole with
what looks like Earth-like planets right on the other end! I could believe
we'd throw a lot into a last ditch effort to find a planet we could live more
easily on.

I probably over-thought it :)

~~~
Udik
> watched it on a home "theatre" and not an imax blow-your-mind "experience"

Whenever I hear that a movie needs a theatre with a screen larger than the
Arecibo telescope for the public to enjoy it, I already know that's a bad
movie.

All the other things you mention are spot on, too. Simply many science fiction
movies lately have stopped making any sense, as if (as if?) the public was
completely unable to tell the difference.

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madengr
“A lot of the information is thrown away when you digitize. In sound terms
it’s overtones and subtones—things that you can’t consciously hear. An analog
medium has all kinds of complicated cross-talk between the different
frequencies of information that you’re getting, which have a particular
character to them”

Similar to audiophile hokeyness. The dust and dirt on the film must add warmth
and character, similar to the hiss and warble of analog tape. If that’s your
thing, fine, but having grown up listening to tape and records, the first time
I heard a CD, my jaw dropped. It was really that much better.

Someone told me once the best record will always be better than the average
CD, but the best CD is always better than the best record.

I do concede the “loudness wars” have really screwed up digital audio, but it
is fundamentally better, and I’m sure uncomprsssed digital video is the same.

~~~
mikro2nd
Have you ever heard a quality recording on a reel-to-reel tape machine at 15
or 30 ips? Digital cannot hold a candle to it.

~~~
ovao
The only compelling, objective reason to record to analog tape is for its
distortion quality. This is particularly true at slower speeds. At 30 ips, I’m
not sure it’s an especially useful medium.

You may also be able to make an argument for analog tape delay, but — saying
this as someone’s who’s been out of the engineering game for a bit, so with
some grain of salt — this is digitally reproducible.

For playback, digital can hold every candle you can think of. Resolution, SNR,
absense of any degradation, ease of use, etc., etc. Given sufficient bit depth
and sample rate, it’s as good as any medium ever needs to be (for human
hearing).

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WalterBright
When arguing about digital vs analog, people miss the elephant in the room:

Why does listening to an actual violin being played a few feet away sound so
much better than any digital or analog recording? It's not a little bit
better. It's a LOT better. Same with a piano or a trumpet.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Because unless you're listening in an anechoic room - which is Not Fun -
reflected ambience creates a hemispherical sound field around an acoustic
source, and stereo recording only captures a small sample of that. (Enough to
create a 2D spatial illusion, but no more than that.)

And also because loudspeaker technology is still pretty terrible compared to
the rest of the audio chain. Converters are nearly perfect, amps can be made
close to perfect at non-trivial cost, microphones are okay but usually add
some colouration, but even the best studio-grade speakers have limitations and
add significant distortion.

And consumer-grade speakers - even expensive ones - are nowhere close to
perfection. And even if they were, you'd still have to deal with room
resonances in the performance room, which would add extra colour to the sound
that wasn't present in the original recorded ambience.

Basically hifi is good enough to be musically enjoyable in a near-enough not-
too-distracting way, but you need research-grade technology - like complex
wavefield speaker arrays and acoustic tuning of the performance space - before
you can record and reproduce sound almost transparently.

~~~
WalterBright
> loudspeaker technology is still pretty terrible compared to the rest of the
> audio chain

Which also goes to my point that arguing about which is better, analog or
digital, is utterly pointless.

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agumonkey
Some of his arguments are very fragile but there's something about the race
for technology that I agree distort the art and the enjoyment.

Maybe it's a transitional period where people are believers of more K (4K
8K... ) makes better movies. I think not. It's like music, it's a balance.
Maybe later the industry will get bored by chasing new features and
moviemakers will go back to making better movies, not better photos.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
When I was walking out of Ready Player One recently the trailer for Infinity
War was showing - and it looked like exactly the same movie, with an
indistinguishable CGI aesthetic, and similar action.

One thing you can say for 2001 is that it wasn't a copy of anything else. In
fact it invented a lot of the visual tropes that are still used in science
fiction movies.

That's not a thing that happens much now. There were some genius-level
directors around in Kubrick's time, but now virtually all movies look like
they live in the same CGI world, with standard stock characters, and similar
directing tropes.

It would be huge fun it CGI stopped working for a few years, and directors had
to go back to telling stories without it.

~~~
agumonkey
Part of this is also normal in a way. Periods were people have everything to
invent, and then periods were people live in previous codes.

Music feel the same. After the 70s most things have been done. 80s brought
some pop color and craziness to it. And now what is there to invent ? hard to
say.

Maybe we hit the ceiling, maybe there's still room for surprise ..

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floren
Is there a list of theaters that will be getting the film? I know there's a
70mm-capable theater in my town that did the Hateful Eight when it was
released, so there's a possibility...

~~~
garyrob
The best list I've found is
[https://www.2001spaceodysseymovie.com/tickets/](https://www.2001spaceodysseymovie.com/tickets/)

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CamperBob2
I don't mean to sound like an insufferable hipster, but '2001' was not
supposed to be drenched in shades of orange and blue like half the movies made
these days. From the screenshots I've seen, Nolan's team appears to have
_seriously_ screwed the pooch on the color timing, in an effort to force a
trendy look on a timeless movie.

E.g.,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_e9y-bka0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_e9y-bka0)

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watmough
Playing in LA.

Any way to know when it is coming to Houston?

~~~
technofiend
[http://www.redballoon.net/h8-venues.txt](http://www.redballoon.net/h8-venues.txt)

Check the two theatres listed here which allegedly have real 70mm projectors.

Also the Museum of Fine Arts Houston has a listing for it but it's not clear
if they have a 70mm projector.

[https://www.mfah.org/calendar/2001-space-
odyssey](https://www.mfah.org/calendar/2001-space-odyssey)

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baby
It's interesting how many people are stuck in the past and refuse to move to
better formats. Because of that we still don't have 60fps movies :/

~~~
damon_c
I saw the Hobbit movies at 48fps and it was not good. There is something about
our brains that makes us reject higher frame rate footage as being...
subjectively unappealing.

A casual perusal of the reviews of the Hobbit HFR films, reveals that most
people agree with this assessment.

I don't think anyone who paid extra to go and see one of the HFR showings
could be labeled as "stuck in the past", but at this point I am definitely not
going to advocate for 60fps in the future. Not because I am resistant to new
formats but because I like movies that I watch to be "good" and higher frame
rate presentations (whether by frame interpolation or by original photography)
seem to be less good.

~~~
twoodfin
I believe Kubrick would have loved the challenge of exploiting HFR. NASA
cameras for _Barry Lyndon_ and all that...

The _Hobbit_ films were a terrible choice to introduce the tech to a
mainstream audience for any number of reasons, the heavy dependence on makeup
and other “artifice” for the production not least.

