In this episode, Devan and Will discuss Steven Soderbergh’s pioneering use of digital image capture in his remarkable run of films that followed his transition away from celluloid-based filmmaking starting with Che in 2008. Focusing on his 2011 epidemic thriller Contagion, we cover his usage of the medium’s perceived ‘drawbacks’ for artistic purposes as well as wider myths and trends in modern digital cinematography, including film emulation.
In today’s episode, we discuss:
Steven Soderbergh’s unusual career trajectory, from high-budget star vehicles to formally radical experiments and back.
The textural implications of the digital image process, including how digital sensors work, clipped highlights, and how traditional celluloid film compares.
The various effects of Soderbergh’s aggressive use of softening filters.
The contrast between Soderbergh’s deployment of digital colour palettes and sickly skintones and his Hollywood movie stars.
How increasingly cheap digital cameras democratize cinema, and Soderbergh’s response to that.
Steven Soderbergh’s films: Contagion, Unsane, The Informant, Magic Mike, Side Effects, and Logan Lucky.
Additional resources:
Comparison stills from a variety of Steven Soderbergh’s films:
DOP Steve Yedlin talks digital cinematography:
Referenced videos by Steve Yedlin who shot Knives Out, Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi, Looper and many more films. In these two videos, he talks about his approach to cinematography, and how he views digital filmmaking.
Can digital filmmaking not just emulate film, but become it’s own digital aesthetic?
Referenced comparison between filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt’s use of celluloid versus digital filmmaking in his films It’s Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow:
Don Hertzfeldt’s film It’s Such a Beautiful Day from 2012 was entirely animated and finished on film.
Then in 2015 Don Hertzfeldt switched to digital for his World of Tomorrow movies. These movies are aggressively digital and they completely take full use of the new medium that he's working with.
These films are just as expressive and organic and non sterile as his other work. They're digital and they wear this fact on their sleeve. They use that as a way to reflect the world that the characters are living in.
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady of Fire is a period piece shot digitally. It looks almost completely grainless, even in lowlight. Devan argues he thinks the cinematographer Claire Mathon was trying to emulate the gaze of a painter.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II is a good example of a film that embraces digital filmmaking qualities in it's lighting and it's colour.
Episode Transcript:
Will Ross 0:00 Hi, I'm Will Ross!
Devan Scott 0:01 I'm Devan Scott.
Will Ross 0:02 We're friends and independent filmmakers. I'm an editor in sound designer, Devan is a cinematographer and colorist.
Devan Scott 0:07 On today's episode we're going to talk about Steven Soderbergh decade and change working with digital cameras after 20 years of working on 35mm film and how that's changed the way he shoots movies like Contagion.
Will Ross 0:17 Welcome to Film Formally! I think it's first worth noting so we say Steven Soderbergh cinematography, and that's not just shorthand, he is actually serves as his own cinematographer on virtually all of his films.
Devan Scott 0:50 Peter Andrews does not exist.
Will Ross 0:52 Right, yeah, that's just his pseudonym. So when did that get started?
Devan Scott 0:56 That technically got started with Schizopolis in 1996, but really started in earnest with Traffic in 2000. I believe he's shot everything since then as Peter Andrews, and I think his filmmaking is visually gotten significantly more interesting as a result. He is very idiosyncratic.
Will Ross 1:17 Do you think there's certain tendencies throughout his career that you can see since Traffic and that makes him idiosyncratic or is he just an evolving beast? Like he's a really diverse guy?
Devan Scott 1:27 I'd say he's both of those things. He's incredibly diverse. Like Ocean's Eleven bears very little visual resemblance to Unsane, except for both have a ton of color and experimentation in them.
Will Ross 1:39 Right, I forgot he shot Ocean's Eleven.
Devan Scott 1:40 Yeah, I know, that's insane. One of the hallmarks of his, I think, his career throughout has been a willingness to experiment with image texture. Everything from the incredibly striking color filters in Traffic, to a typical glossy red, blown out highlights in stuff like Contagion and Haywire, iPhone7 converted to look almost like film in Unsane. He used the film emulation lookup table there along with film grain to give it a texture I've never seen, I think, in a film. So that's I think, if I had to say, a defining element to cinematography since that, is that.
Will Ross 2:21 Right.
Devan Scott 2:22 And I think that does go hand in hand with a lot of other elements of his filmmaking as a director, we can kind of get into those. I'd like to especially focus on his digital work. He has cycled through a number of shooting formats since he became his own cinematographer. He shot, I think, virtually everything between Traffic and Ocean's Thirteen on film, with the exception of Full Frontal which is shot on... it was shot on the Canon XL 1S, which is, as someone who's actually used the Canon XL2, have tremendous visually unappealing camera in the traditional sense. And starting with Che he switched from using 35 to the RED digital camera system, RED being a quite high end, high resolution digital system. That was pretty much the first major knockout success of the digital revolution in terms of convincing high profile 35mm filmmakers to switch over. Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher were two that come to mind as particularly high profile users. I think Fincher's first RED film was The Social Network. And Soderbergh has mostly stuck with the RED since with I believe the exceptions of Unsane and High Flying Bird, which were both shot using the iPhone.
Will Ross 3:50 I think Che is a really interesting start for him using the RED because if you look at just a random scene out of Che what you see is mostly like pretty conventional to early digital, where especially in part one, there's like highlights that are a little bit blown up and clipping in kind of awkward ways quite heavily saturated. Part two, though, is a very different looking film because it's under saturated, it's a different aspect ratio. And even though taken on their own, both parts are not especially unconventional or striking visually, I think they do kind of form an interesting mission statement of him being willing to change up the aesthetic that he's using on a dime to suit the project or even the part of the project that he's working on.
Devan Scott 4:38 I think that really falls in line with Soderbergh's proclivity for really not prizing kind of compositional and filmic perfection. The very fact that he is so willing to clip highlights shows us that he's more interested in decisive visual schemes rather than trying to iron out all the kinks of his visual schemes.
Will Ross 4:57 What do you mean by clip highlights? What is that?
Devan Scott 5:01 Clip highlights are one of the hallmarks of digital image capture. We can get into the weeds on this digital image sensors which are what digital camcorders use and deal with light in a very different way to 35 millimeter or I should call it celluloid film. There's also 16mm, 8mm, 70mm etc. Celluloid film is made out of silver highlight crystals, which block out light as they are exposed to light, they increase opacity. And that's how you get a negative. That's how they measure light, and then that image is reversed and you get a you know, a positive image that looks like what you're used to seeing on a film screen. Digital image sensors actually have little photo sites. They're made of an array of square pixels essentially, that measure the amount of light that hits them and then convert that to a charge and that charge becomes the info that is sent to the computer inside the camera that you know is then translated into images we can see and interpret with our eyes. However, all these photo sites have a limit to how much light they can read. After a while they cannot differentiate between really bright and really, really bright. And that leads to what's called highlight clipping featureless areas of pure white film does not do that and quote unquote rolls off into highlights smoothly. Highlights on film look more like it's almost like been burned through is how it can best put it. And digitally, it generally looks like a hard line between very bright gray and white. Soderbergh makes liberal use of these clips highlights, as a cinematographer your usually trained to limit highlight clipping as much as possible. Soderbergh clearly doesn't. I don't think he's ever really adhere to that rule. I think virtually all all his digital work is rife with that.
Will Ross 6:48 I think a really good example, if you just happen to have it on hand, is if you look at the opening scene of Haywire...
Devan Scott 6:54 The windows in that.
Will Ross 6:55 A character steps into a cafe in this sort of snowy area. And outside the windows, you can very clearly see like parts of the snow that are just plain bright white. There's a sharp line between those bright white areas and the slightly less bright white areas around them.
Devan Scott 7:13 Or take the opening scene of Contagion. And Gwyneth Paltrow is in the foreground, there are fluorescent bulbs green in the background and they are pure white. You cannot make out the bulbs. It's just blobs of white and Soderbergh - most other filmmakers would avoid that at all costs. They would add a bunch of light to Paltrow's face and then expose downwards. But no Soderbergh just let them blow out. And he's never really stopped doing that, even when the RED Epic, which is what Contagion was shot on, has pretty good highlight detail, and he chooses to let that happen. Why do you think he might do that?
Will Ross 7:46 I think it depends a lot on the film. And I think one of the important techniques that Soderbergh uses a lot is, depending on the film, he will soften his highlights.
Devan Scott 8:00 He uses a variety of softening filters, which are basically plains glass you put in front of your lens with various stuff applied to it. And for example, you might have optical softening filters, which is dozens, hundreds of little lenslets, tiny little lenses eshed into the glass or you might just have what's essentially very expensive sandblasted glass.
Will Ross 8:19 Yeah. So for example, in Shade, he doesn't do that at all, he doesn't soften it up. And in Contagion, he doesn't soften it at all.
Devan Scott 8:26 He actually, there is softening in Contagion.
Will Ross 8:29 Yeah?
Devan Scott 8:29 I think the most obvious example is the gymnasium scene with Kate Winslet.
Will Ross 8:34 Oh yeah....
Devan Scott 8:34 There is a lot of softening background there. And you can see it in the streetlights of the exterior scenes. If I had to guess, these look like some sort of smear filters. You get these weird vertical highlight smears that it's hard to say, I can't find any actual info on that, but I'm sure that --
Will Ross 8:52 Correct me if I'm wrong. I think his second film he shot digitally was I think The Girlfriend Experience.
Devan Scott 8:57 Yes.
Will Ross 8:57 And that's when he really started using them and to me on The Girlfriend Experience, the softening reads as him emulating film and The Girlfriend Experience is mostly a more or less conventionally shot movie.
Devan Scott 9:13 There is some digital softening there. There's this airplane scene about 10 minutes and that's been it's like the opposite of a clarity filter. It's been digitally softened and you can really see the difference.
Will Ross 9:24 Right.
Devan Scott 9:24 He doesn't try and hide it. It's very obviously like it looks almost like a very bad Instagram filter.
Will Ross 9:28 Right, but then his next movie after The Girlfriend Experiences is The Informant. And that's when things, to me, that's when digital Soderbergh really starts to get interesting, where he starts doing things digitally that you can't really do in film or is much, much harder to do in film.
Devan Scott 9:47 I agree.
Will Ross 9:47 He softens the hell out of everything in that movie. The colors are super sickly unreal looking, he just pushes certain colors in the frame. Way, way, way beyond the saturation of others, especially usually blues and greens. And everything's just been so softened and the colors are so unnatural you get these like weird blue green skies. So you get the combination of those sort of scuzzy sort of almost brand label colors combined with that heavy, heavy softening, putting a gloss on everything, which makes for a pretty intuitive way to film a satire of corporate America.
Devan Scott 10:28 I think that kind of tendency probably peaked with Behind the Candelabra, which has endless, endless, almost overpoweringly distracting softening done. It looks like it's been done with a variety of filters and stockings. You can actually put a stocking over your lens to do that. That's what Janusz Kamiński does on a lot of Spielberg, but he kept pushing that envelope over and over and over. The Knick too has a ton of that. I think I parallel we can see between Soderberg's use of digital cinematography and his deployment of extremely attractive Hollywood stars. I think one of the hallmarks to Soderberg's career to this point has been finding ways to tweak and undercut the kind of Hollywood star image. This is everywhere.
Will Ross 11:08 Magic Mike. In Magic Mike he shoots everything outside of dance sequences, I think or more almost everything, especially exteriors and stuff in people's homes, he shoots with a double straw filter that just puts yellow all over the frame and makes everything look like there's a layer of urine over it. Which is pretty striking for a movie that was sold heavily for its colorful high contrast, glossy dance sequences in advertising.
Devan Scott 11:36 Or Contagion where the first shot is of, as far as I can tell, unmade up Gwyneth Paltrow now at the time one of the most famous stars in the world, who is shot in one of the most unflattering ways I've ever seen any major Hollywood star shot, who then dies five minutes in and I think that pretty much sums up how he uses stars in that movie. So in Haywire where a creative famous male actors get their ass kicked by a MMA fighter. Soderbergh loves that undermining our expectations for what the people we recognize on screen will do. That's to me that really feels of a piece with his digital filming where he does all he can to de-glamorize most of the people he shoots, unless he really really wants to go far with that and glamorize them to the point of almost self parody and stuff like Behind the Candelabra.
Will Ross 12:23 He uses very low contrast. And often when you have low contrast, you can sort of offset it partly with color differentiation, but he also often tends towards fairly monochromatic palettes as well.
Devan Scott 12:37 Yeah, and I would say monochrome is a key word here. And I want to differentiate that from grayscale. Monochrome meaning most of his shots will have lots of color, they'll just have one color. You can see that probably most famously in Traffic, where each of the separate stories in that hyperlink narrative is given one color, and similarly Contagion has that. It's a bit less tied to the individual narratives and more, just every special has its own extremely striking color, green, blue for the gymnasium, etc, etc. And that really flies in the face of traditional ideas of how to shoot actors. As a colorist, you are trained to stick to skin tones usually, you know, and this can be seen in Contagion where, despite the fact that the color is less tied to individual plot strands, it's tied to locations, right? So you have the blue gymnasium, the yellow green in the CDC offices, and that lends a lot of tonal rhythm to the film I think and a lot of instant geographic readability, right? You know where you are.
Will Ross 13:38 One question I do have and this ties into the actors not being very flatteringly shot is in a lot of Soderbergh's movies, and it's very prevalent in Contagion, characters will have pretty underexposed faces. In other words, their their faces are quite dark on screen. But the highlights still remain quite bright. How would you describe that as a flat contrast curve? Is that what what would that be?
Devan Scott 14:07 I'd say it's more of a lack of willingness to light the actor is a conventionally attractive way. To shoot scenarios where the reality of the lighting takes precedence over the need to massage that later, right? If I was to light a scene with an actor in the foreground, from a very bright window in the background, I might add a very bright light, you know, like some sort of 3000 watts, you know, HMI or something on the actor's face to even that light out, right. Soderbergh is much less willing to do that. And I think he foregrounds that for the sake of, I think there's a lot of reasons, but in Contagion, it feels like it's intentionally trying to make everyone look as horrible and sickly as possible at all times.
Will Ross 14:47 I think it's worth noting that, especially after he starts making movies digitally, a lot of Soderbergh's movies are sickly looking movies about sick people. Right? I mean, you have most obviously Contagion. You have Haywire, which makes the sort of world of the action spy thriller look a lot less visually appealing. I'm not sure exactly how well that stratagem works there. But then you have Side Effects, which is on top of that sort of sickly look a very hazy movie. That's one where the softening filter gets absolutely cranked up to 11. And the whole thing just is hazy and sickly, and everyone looks terrible in it. And then later on, you have Magic Mike, where all the material outside the club is really sickly and implicitly that's because they're living in a world where everyone is sort of dehumanized and sick in a more spiritual way. And then you have Unsane which obviously is about a mental health facility and so a lot of his movies that shoots digitally, really benefit from him not being interested in flattering his actors. But another thing I wanted to bring up along those lines is that another reason, besides just flattering the actors, to shoot actors with somewhat brightly lit faces is so that the actors faces aren't competing for attention with whatever other highlights there are in the frame. So if there's a lamp in the frame, it's not just this big, bright, glowing spotlight while the actor is just some dark mush in the corner of the frame amongst all the other shadows, right. So that's that's sort of something that Soderbergh plays with the scene in haywire. I mentioned where there's the snow outside, I think is a good example of him. Not making that work well, because all you can do in that scene is look at the big radioactive glowing white outside the window, but a lot of Haywire and a lot of his other digital movies are quite smart in the way that they use those highlights to compensate where they'll pepper them throughout the frame a bit more liberally so that your eyes not just immediately drawn to a single focal point at the expense of the actor or he'll my one of my favorite things he does is he halos, the actors, so he puts the light more or less evenly around their body or around their head, so that the light is an accentuation. It's an outline for the actors so that our focus stays on that character.
Devan Scott 17:35 I think that's a good break down in the composition, unusual compositional tools he uses. Your mention of Unsane got me really thinking about focal lengths. Because Unsane is fairly interesting in that on a cell phone, you're stuck with a very narrow range of focal lengths. And when I say focal lengths, I mean, essentially how far lenses zoomed in, in that, if you're on a 20mm lens, you have a very wide field of view. You can see a lot in front of you; the cone of vision is wide. On a 300mm lens, very narrow cone of vision. It's almost like you're zoomed in very far on something in the distance. In Unsane it's largely shot on very, very wide focal lengths. So you'll have shots where actors are as a result of those wide focal lengths, you know, distorted in corners of the frame. There's one shot that I loved where Claire Foy is lying on a bed, and her face is in the bottom left exact corner of the frame and it is distorted more than I've ever seen any a-list actor distorted and perfectly matches the moment right? This character doesn't know whether they're going insane or not.
Will Ross 18:39 Their going Unsane.
Devan Scott 18:40 Their self perception is being literally and figuratively skewed. That was fun.
Will Ross 18:47 Yeah, I think Unsane and High Flying Bird are a good example of how Soderbergh takes digital technology seriously, not just in terms of what it directly brings to aesthetics, but I think he's just fascinated with the other implications of the form, like the commercial democratization of the form that a lot of people talk about. Shooting a film or two feature films entirely on an iPhone and doing them in completely different styles, I think is a good example of a filmmaker who's taking that completely seriously, because in Unsane, you'll see he uses the very wide focal length, I think most of it was shot 18mm on that adapter, but uses a very, very wide focal lengths that are pretty common to smartphones. And those focal lengths make it pretty hard to shoot close ups of actors without distorting them because typically, in a close up of an actor, they're filling the screen and if you're that close to an actor on a wide lens, then you tend to distort them, which might not be what you want. And that's a pretty common way actually to suggest a psychological distortion to this toward the character in, close up, but Soderbergh doesn't do that most of the time and Unsane he uses pretty clever methods, like he will give the actors a lot of what's called headroom, which means that there's a lot of room between the top of the characters heads and the top of frame. Convention is usually to, more or less minimize headroom in anything but a very wide shot, but by giving them a lot of headroom, he allows the upper parts of the frame which are usually the ceilings of this facility, he allows the upper parts of the frames' lines to sort of comment on and complicate the characters. So their headspace above their heads is literally used to get into their headspace and on the other hand, High Flying Bird, which personally I think is a much less visually successful film, is more or less conventionally framed most of the time.
Devan Scott 20:56 One thing I noticed though, is the aspect ratio. Unsane is shot at a 1.5:1 ratio, which is very unusual in films, very common in still photography, but in films, it's hugely uncommon. And then High Flying Bird is shot CinemaScope, 239:1. And I actually think that Soderbergh is in general a much better user of tall aspect ratios, I think his 185 work, his 178 work, and his 1.5 work in that case tends to be superior to his CinemaScope work, especially in his later films. I think Logan Lucky is a good example of not what I call his best framing. I have some issues with that films use of focal lengths and CinemaScope in enclosed spaces. I'm not sure that the distortion is an asset in that film in the same way it isn't Unsane. I couldn't quite jive with it both instinctually and intellectually.
Will Ross 21:49 And I think Logan Lucky is an interesting film too, because it's the first digital film that he'd made at least since I think The Girlfriend Experience that looks -- it's a pretty conventional looking movie for the most part.
Devan Scott 22:07 It doesn't have those crazy color washes he's used almost omnipresently since.
Will Ross 22:10 Yeah, like you see him pushing the exteriors a little more towards the greens going outside then you'd maybe normally expect in a movie with a bunch of a list actors, but for the most part, it doesn't look that much unlike what you'd expect a regular Hollywood film to look like. And I think that's and that brings up another point I want to make, which is that before he went digital, Soderbergh was pretty clearly I think, an extremely capable cinematographer who could shoot movies that didn't look crazily unlike other movies that were quite striking, but still didn't look totally out of line with what you'd expect from a multiplex experience.
Devan Scott 22:56 Yeah, like Oceans 11 looks not unlike something like Casino in a lot of ways, for example.
Will Ross 23:02 Yeah. And they're great looking movies, though, I would say his more visually unusual movies from his celluloid period are actually his less impressive looking movies. And then that flips on its head in his digital period where the more conventional looking his movies are, or at least the more conventional his sort of aesthetic approaches, the worst looking they tend to be. Yeah, and I'm not I'm not entirely, I haven't really internally resolve that in my head. Except maybe...
Devan Scott 23:34 I wonder if it's a Spielberg?
Will Ross 23:35 ...that when he switched to digital, he just has this internal tool set for what digital can do. And it's just not, unlike someone like, famously, Roger Deakins, who uses digital tools more or less as an extension of the philosophy of photographing for film, he might just fundamentally have a different starting point for how he approaches digital, but I'm not sure how to articulate what that starting point would be.
Devan Scott 24:02 I have two thoughts on that. First is on the almost like the "you can't go home again" aesthetically thing. Where it feels almost like it could be a Steven Spielberg situation where his formal toolkit has just evolved. He's changed as a human and as an artist and going back is difficult when you've done that. I use this over comparison because, you know, in the Nazi era in the 90s is when he really started becoming more visually and tonally experimental and darker. And then he you know, he goes back to shooting Indiana Jones movie with his new cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. And I think it's his worst looking film of the past 30 years, because it feels like he's trying to almost emulate his former self and that almost feels like when Logan Lucky is. It's like, "hey, I want to shoot Oceans 11 again," but he's almost the muscles that he used to shoot Oceans 11 have atrophied in lieu of other slightly more unconventional ones. And secondly, I want to expand on the Roger Deakins thing, when we get a chance because that whole idea of shooting digital to look like film I think is an interesting counterpoint to all this.
Will Ross 25:11 Right... here's your chance.
Devan Scott 25:14 [Laughs] Okay. So I think, the Roger Deakins I would call school shooting digital, fascinates me as almost the flip side to all this. Soderbergh and some other directors, and I think that number is actually dwindling increasingly, elected to try and create a whole new aesthetics digitally. I think The Social Network was the moment where that clicked for me, where David Fincher use the RED One, a very high resolution digital camera, and then d-noised it hugely, which means that he used a computer algorithm to limit the amount of grain in the image to create a very plasticy movie, and it felt like a computer interface turned into a live action film. There was no texture to anything. I thought it was gorgeous. In the ugly Fincher way. If we look at the evolution of how digital has evolved in kind of the aficionados/professional consciousness in the early 2010s, we had a ton of discourse around the perceived kind of inherent differences between film and digital, where digital was always seen as antiseptic, clean, you know, almost sterile, and film was seen as organic authentic these, I think, slightly useless adjectives. But what happened with especially the release of the ARRI Alexa, ARRI being a camera company who was probably the most prominent maker of 35mm cameras in the world, I believe. At least one of them. They made probably the I think the single most important digital camera for Hollywood at least which is the ARRI Alexa, which is a camera designed to appeal to people who shoot on 35mm. It has an image texture and color science that attempts to replicate almost this ideal of what film looks like and it was designed in consultation with various cinematographers such as Roger Deakins. And of course a lot of them jumped on board. It almost felt like at the time he jumped to that, and then everyone else followed suit because everyone's like, "oh, if it's good enough, Roger." And since then we've seen a massive increase in the amount of digital films, prestige films, blockbusters, you know, it's almost universal now. So you had almost a second or third wave of digital filmmaking, where we started coming closer and closer and closer to replicating the look of film with digital. If anyone wants to see Steve Yedlin videos, look them up online. He's Ryan Johnson cinematographer. I think he is probably the world's best educator on the subject. We, I think in around the mid 2010s, late 2010s, kind of eventually got to a point when you can realistically shoot something on the ARRI Alexa and other cameras that was almost indistinguishable to an audience for film and at this point, talking in 2020. We are there. As a result, that kind of impulse to create a parallel aesthetic I think has, not died, but it's been sidelined. I don't see many major filmmakers still fighting that fight, which I think is pretty tragic. And I include myself among that. I've spent a lot of time in the past few years learning how to better emulate film.
Will Ross 28:19 Yeah, I think one of the big reasons for that has got to be that sort of a lack of imagination for what a digital aesthetic can create in a narrative setting. Part of that just got to be the limitations of Hollywood style narrative filmmaking, right? I think one of the filmmakers who has done the best job of busting sort of the notion that a digital aesthetic is inherently more clinical, or less, quote, unquote, organic aesthetically, is Don Hertzfeld, who made his movie It's Such a Beautiful Day and all of its previous work entirely animated and finished on film, and then switch to digital for his World of Tomorrow movies. And those movies are aggressively digital. They completely take full use of the new medium that he's working with. But they're also just as expressive and organic and non-sterile as his other work. They're digital and they wear the fact that they are made on computers on their sleeve, but they use that as a way to reflect the world that the characters are living in. And I wonder if, part of me thinks that the only way you can adapt to new ideas to make it look like an old idea. And I guess that's what we're seeing with digital cinematography now. And I wonder if there's ways to incorporate the new ways to use digital cinematography into those more conventional films that isn't just "Oh, this looks sterile. This looks sick." And from what I've seen, so far, it seems like Soderbergh hasn't quite cracked that nut yet.
Devan Scott 30:05 I think Unsane is a really interesting kind of paradoxical example of this where it was shot on an iPhone, which probably has more of the qualities we would associate with that digital sterility than anything else. But use film emulation plug in, to me, it looks like Film Convert and a green generator or green loop to add the sunless patina of ______ to it, and it's both foregrounding that and the phone-ness of it. So you have this weird fusion of, and I think very successful fusion, of elements that we would share typically associate with film elements we stereotypically associated with low grade consumer video. And to me that is almost the opposite of what he was doing with stuff like Contagion where he was borrowing, non textual elements of 35mm like depth of field and combining that with an aggressively digital almost image finishing process, which shows me that he's really thinking about every single part of the image, which is interesting. Are there any modern films in the past couple of years that you think use digital image capture in a way that doesn't try and overly emulate film that stand out to you?
Will Ross 31:22 That stand out to me? Give me -- give me a second to think about that.
Devan Scott 31:26 One comes to mind for me while you think about it, which is Céline Sciamma Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which…
Will Ross 31:33 I haven't seen that yet.
Devan Scott 31:35 Which you should! It's fantastic. What she and her cinematographer Claire Mathon... I probably horribly mispronounce your name Claire, I'm sorry. It was shot on I believe, I think it was shot an 8k on the RED, which is unusual because it's a period piece and generally Hollywood cinematographers, all right, not Hollywood, but prestige cinematographers like I would say, try and shoot period pieces on film or something that looks like film and this in fact, it does not look like film. It looks like it's almost totally grainless. The lowlights cinematography is clean. The colors do not try and emulate any film stock that I know of. But what it does do is it, I think tries to emulate the gaze of a painter. Doesn't even try and emulate a painting. I think it's trying to emulate how a painter see the world. And it subtly tweaks our expectations for what a period piece might look like to do so and I think it's incredibly successful with that. But that's the exception. I can't think of many other films in the past year or so that have really impressed me with forging new ways of using digital image capture.
Will Ross 32:43 It's kind of a catch 22 of a question to me, because if it looks very distinctly digital, if it looks like it's not emulating film and it's in a conventionally shot narrative film, then those things aren't compatible with each other at this point in my head, because if it's a conventionally shot film, then it's going to look like something pretty analogous to film.
Devan Scott 33:09 Perhaps. Although I would say that the formal conventions of classical Hollywood cinema don't necessarily rest on that filmicness, right? A lot of it is the blocking, the framing, the continuity. I think a film that maybe breaks all that could Bi Gan Long Day's Journey into the Night, which is I've only seen the 45 minute shot because I have a low attention span. No, I'm gonna watch it.
Will Ross 33:33 [Laughing at Devan]
Devan Scott 33:34 But, but he uses both the kind of quote unquote limitations of digital which is, you know, that noise, that clinical feel that people distribute that I take issue with, and I take issue with the idea, not the aesthetic, and combines that with the possibilities of digital camera placement to create, you know, in the case labs, I'm a 40 minute-ish, is probably longer, shot that switches camera mediums multiple times and does things that I did not think were possible before watching that film.
Will Ross 34:07 Oh and Asako I & II by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, I think is a very good example of a film that definitely embraces digital filmmaking qualities in it's lighting and it's color in its... I think that's another. Maybe wrapping up: do you have a favourite....
Devan Scott 34:26 Wait wait wait. What about Cats? Cats!
Will Ross 34:28 Oh my god. All right, talk about Cats.
Devan Scott 34:36 No. [Laughs] Cats is utterly digital, but I think it's failing something to do with the digital-ness, which actually gets me to like one point which is...
Will Ross 34:45 ...digital fur technology, right?
Devan Scott 34:47 I mean, when we're talking about digital image capture, I think a lot of people are very quick to blame any perceived failings of an image on that digital image capture when I think that oftentimes there miss diagnosing and I think people should stop that. That's my thought.
Will Ross 35:06 Good analysis.
Devan Scott 35:07 It takes deep takes and hot quotes.
Will Ross 35:11 What's your favorite looking Soderbergh movie?
Devan Scott 35:14 Ooff. That's hard. I think pre-digital Traffic, post digital it's probably Contagion or Side Effects. I don't know man, like Contagion has those color rhythms that I just love.
Will Ross 35:36 Contagion is such a cool looking movie, and maybe it's just... Side Effects looks like no other movie ever made. And it has like some of the most incredible, medium and close up compositions I've ever seen. It's just insane. It's just it's amazing. It's an amazing, it's an amazing movie in general. It's my favourite Soderbergh. But visually, it's so inspiring to me. Would you rank Traffic over Contagion and Side Effects? Is that your favourite?
Devan Scott 36:07 I have a hard time comparing and I don't know if I could rank them.
Will Ross 36:11 You just like them because they're wacky because they're wacky with colours.
Devan Scott 36:14 Yeah, no, that's me. Right? I mean, you know, Yeah, I know.
Will Ross 36:18 Your heart says Contagion and Traffic, but your head says Side Effects.
Devan Scott 36:23 I mean, I am a staunchly anti-substance pro style person. I am shallow and vain, and not a very good human being.
Will Ross 36:33 Well, you want movies about vain, bad people with shallow depth of field, you know where you go. You watch Side Effects.
Devan Scott 36:44 This is true, but that maybe has substance, so you know, I can't. I can't endorse it.
Will Ross 36:51 I guess it's a good time to wrap up. If you want to come on the show or have an idea for a topic we can discuss. You can get in touch by email via filmformally@gmail.com or you can find us on social media or Twitter or Facebook at Film Formerly. We'd like to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. If you like this podcast, be sure to rate it, review it and subscribe to it really helps other people find it. Next episode we're going to be discussing what it's like to take a super scaled down approach to making movies with Toronto director Sophy Romvari. See you then!