Christopher Nolan bats for celluloid filmmaking
During his recent trip to India, the Oscar-nominated director urged the Bollywood fraternity to shoot movies on 70 mm reel as opposed to the digital medium
Hollywood director Christopher Nolan recently made an impassioned plea to the Indian film industry to revive celluloid as a medium for movies.
Nolan was on a three-day trip to the country aimed at drumming up support for shooting on film, as he did for his 2017 World War II epic Dunkirk, going against the trend in an industry which has widely embraced digital technology.
“Filmmaking is full of obstacles... it is not about being logical and pragmatic... it’s about magic, dreams, experiences and bracing your emotional side,” Nolan said after a round-table dialogue in Mumbai, the home of Bollywood.
The 47-year-old Oscar-nominated director said he had “a very productive” meeting with members of Bollywood, the world’s largest film industry.
“I am really trying to engage filmmakers in this conversation about how we can maintain, improve and continue to enjoy the celluloid photochemical analogue infrastructure for filmmaking,” Nolan added. Famed for his extravagant vision in films such as Interstellar and Inception, Nolan is one of the few big names who still use celluloid for filmmaking. “We are trying to preserve for future generation the history of films, especially in the way filmmakers originally intended to make movies,” Nolan stated.
He was joined in the discussion by visual artist Tacita Dean and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. “We are fighting to save celluloid films in India whereas people are disbanding it without realising their importance. We are talking about co-existence with digital formats. Till 2014, we were shooting in older formats in India,” said Dungarpur.
With inputs from Agencies