While it’s the movies that are the big deal at the Sundance Film Festival, yesterday organizers in Park City hosted an event that was arguably just as much of an attraction as any of the features being screened. Christopher Nolan ("The Dark Knight," "Interstellar"), Colin Trevorrow ("Safety Not Guaranteed," "Jurassic World"), cinematographer Rachel Morrison ("Fruitvale Station," "Dope"), and Alex Ross Perry ("Listen Up Phillip," "Queen Of Earth") sat down for an extensive conversation about moviemaking.
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While Perry was the moderator, all four get involved in what’s a lively conversation about the realities of moviemaking at the moment. Nolan, of course, advocates very hard for celluloid, warns of cinema heading into a McDonald’s-like future where everything is shot and projected the same way. That said, Morrison and Perry do make the point that the realities and budgets of independent filmmaking don’t always allow for the luxury of film. Meanwhile, Trevorrow pointed out that another issue facing the future of cinema, particularly for younger audiences, are TVs arriving with the motion smoothing feature turned on be default, which increases the frame rates, making everything look like a soap opera. It’s an issue that bothers the director so much, that for a preview of "Jurassic World" footage on Samsung TVs in Best Buy across the country last year, he got the TV maker and store to properly recalibrate the TVs, before he agreed to do the promotion.
If you’re scanning the talk to hear Nolan discuss Batman, sorry you won’t find that here, but Trevorrow did briefly discuss "Star Wars: Episode IX" — he wants to shoot it on film.
“There’s something in my brain that says, ‘well they didn’t have video cameras then,’” he said, jokingly adding: “It’s a period film. It happened a long time ago.”
The entire discussion is fascinating, so check it out below. It starts around the 30-minute mark.
