What do high definition (HD) movies look like when they are projected on screen? That's what the DGA Special Projects screening of Gil Cates' Collected Stories gave its audience the chance to find out. It was a rare opportunity to see, via state-of-the-art 15 SXTI projection and D5 Panasonic playback equipment, what HD really looks like.
Collected Stories is an HD production for PBS that reprises Cates' 1999 award-winning play (by Donald Margulies) at the Geffen Theatre with Linda Lavin and Samantha Mathis. The movie also stars Lavin and Mathis and was shot in 12 days.
After the January 22 screening, Gil Cates (former Guild President, current Guild Secretary/Treasurer) and cinematographer John W. Simmons talked about the unique challenge of translating a play like Collected Stories to the high definition screen. The discussion was moderated by DGA director member Penelope Spheeris (The Decline of Western Civilization, Wayne's World), who recently directed the feature-length Hi-Def/mini-DV documentary, We Sold Our Souls for Rock 'n' Roll.
"I never had the opportunity to direct a movie that I had directed on stage," Cates said. "We all came back together again after three years, having had the chance to let it all sink in. It helped that we did it on stage for ten weeks and then had a three-week rehearsal period before shooting. The actors were very familiar with the story and characters."
Cates said he chose the HD format because he wanted to stay true to the play rather than open it up into a big production. Intrigued by the possibilities for his own project, he visited the set when Simmons was shooting an HD film with Debbie Allen. Cates asked Allen about the cinematographer and was given an enthusiastic recommendation.
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DGA Secretary-Treasurer Gil Cates (center) with cinematographer John W. Simmons (right) and DGA director member Penelope Spheeris. (Photo: Robert Hale)
Click picture for larger view.
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Simmons, who has now shot three movies in HD, explained, "The thing about high definition is that it doesn't like highlights. Sometimes we'd go onto the set and Gil wouldn't even realize things were lit, because the light levels would be so low."
The majority of the script for Collected Stories takes place between two characters in one room. Though the intimate nature lends itself well to the HD format, it was a challenge to make the piece look visually interesting.
"We had to shoot with the lenses wide open, like 1:4," Simmons added, "because the moment you come off of 1:4 it turns into video tape. We had to be able to shoot with a little compression ... to back off and make the lenses a little bit longer than you normally would choose them to be." But shooting with the lenses wide open, Simmons added, "puts a lot of pressure on the focus pulling, because there is no depth of field. There are literally times when one eye is in focus and the other eye is out of focus."
Simmons made it clear, however, that no attempt was made to achieve a "film look" with the piece. "We didn't want to make it look like film, we just wanted to make it look like the new medium that it is — to embrace everything the technology has to offer."
Cates agreed with Spheeris who said that too often many directors try to make high definition look like film, and it ultimately "fails when you do that."
Cates admitted that the screening, which was the first time he had seen his movie projected in HD, surprised him. "It didn't look like film or television," Cates said. "It looked like something else — like a hybrid. I came away with this feeling like, 'this is its own thing,' and if you accept it on its own terms, it's wonderful.
"For the first film I made, I Never Sang for My Father in 1967, I used a Mitchell camera with a big five-inch viewer on the side," Cates said. "The thing I loved about the five-inch viewer was that the operator was looking through the viewer, the director was looking through the viewer, everybody was looking through the viewer. Now, you dissolve, it's 35 years later, it's a whole new technology, and we've come full circle. Here it is — the five-inch monitor. It's liquid crystal, but everybody's there, looking through the same thing."
Cates wanted to use two cameras as much as possible on the shoot, stacking cameras at times and using a steadicam whenever possible. "Having a steadicam operator full time is great in case you get into a jam," Cates said, "not to look like a steadycam shot, but simply to do a complicated move without having to lay the dance floor down."
He added that the tight schedule was also a factor in the decision to use two cameras. To make the schedule, they had to shoot 12 to 15 pages a day.
Cates also said he felt the recently ratified DGA contract was ideal for HD productions. "Part of the thing with this 'blended contract' we finally achieved," he explained, "is that for too long the issue of which contract you were shooting a [picture] on depended upon whether there was film rolling through the camera or tape rolling through the camera. Now it's dependent on the way the film is shot. We shot this absolutely like a film — from the board to the setups to how we approached the day's work. So from that point of view it was a movie." Cates, as Chair of the DGA's Negotiating Committee, played a leading role in the negotiations to achieve the blended contract. (For further information about the contract, see contract negotiations story here.)
Simmons discussed some of the technical considerations involved in shooting a bigger-budget film on high definition. For example, he said, "Outdoors you're flying a lot of silks. Certain times of day you have to top everything off, and sometimes that's a time-consuming operation, but there's no way around it."
When asked whether he'd be comfortable shooting a big action film on HD, Simmons smiled: "It'd be worth trying."
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