Thursday, May 03, 2007

The Death of Film

Legendary director David Lynch, occasionally seen out and about in Ojai, which gives me some sketchy local connection for this posting, has written a thoughtful and lucid essay in Lost magazine, an excerpt from his book, "Catching the Big Fish," about the myriad benefits of digital cameras versus the enormous 35 mm dinosaurs.

http://www.lostmag.com/issue13/cinematography.php

I especially was struck by how digital is changing the relationship between actors and directors, how actors actually get to spend more time acting and less time waiting around on location. Some folks believe that actors enjoy spending their time in their trailers, waiting for cameras to reload, but most of the actors I know would prefer to spend their time acting. Actors love to act! Whoduthunk?

Lynch writes: "And for actors, to get down into a character in the middle of a scene and then suddenly have to stop while we reload the film cameras after ten minutes — often, this breaks the thing. But now you're rolling along; you've got 40 minutes down in there. And you can start talking to the actors, and instead of stopping it you can move in and push it."

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Now if he had great stories for those great dv cameras he would still be shooting with film. That's the catch 22 to his career. His films don't make money. He had to sell "Inland Empire" to a french company and he self distributed it in the states. Did anyone out there see this film?

5/15/2007 2:28 PM  

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