Film has been officially over and done with for a while now, and for cinema fans everywhere, this is really a damn shame. There have been tremendous strides being made with digital, and it looks fine in most movies, but to many cinema fans it will never be as good as celluloid.
Warner Brothers reportedly put pressure on Christopher Nolan to shoot The Dark Knight Rises in digital 3D, and he refused to do it. Only the big boys can get a movie made on film, and that’s apparently what JJ Abrams will be doing with the next Star Wars flick, which will indeed be shot on 35mm.
This interesting little piece of info was revealed by cinematographer Dan Mindel on Collider. Mindel shot both Star Trek movies for JJ, and will also shoot Star Wars for him as well. There’s a funny irony in this, because George Lucas has lead the charge for the digital video revolution for years. He was the first major director to stop working in film, and others, like James Cameron and David Fincher, quickly followed.
Still, it’s nice to see a director flexing his muscles for the right reasons. With all the film labs closing, you wonder how they’ll even be able to develop a film print, but you also know that people will be more than happy to jump through whatever hoops they have to for the Star Wars series, even if it’s very expensive and inconvenient to do it.
