This article originally appeared in Issue 01, Volume B of DigitalCinema Magazine( COVER PHOTO BY SCOTT BILLUPS )
This article originally appeared in Issue 01, Volume B of DigitalCinema Magazine
( COVER PHOTO BY SCOTT BILLUPS )
In an industry that all-to-often values commercial viability over artistic freedom, David Lynch has chiseled out a career full of exceptions to the rule. From his 1977 underground classic Eraserhead to the enigmatically beautiful Blue Velvet, his films have managed to find beauty in the darkest recesses of the human condition.
Having just completed a tour of duty (Visual Effects Supervisor) on his latest film, Mulholland Drive, I was deeply impressed by the staggering originality of his ideas and the clarity of his vision. His innate ability to paint those visions to film is the truest mark of a consummate artist.
A few weeks after wrapping Mulholland Drive, David and I were sitting on my porch drinking some java and nibbling biscotti when he tells me he`s got this commercial to do, "Sony PlayStation2, international roll-out." I was impressed. "I want you to shoot it." I was flattered. "On DVCAM." I was terrified.
Let`s face it, crawling behind the camera for David Lynch is a daunting task for any DP because this guy really knows what he wants. He has pallet and lighting preferences that are not only unique, but universally regarded. Like many, I consider the work he did with DP Peter Deming on Lost Highway to be among the most cinematically expressive work in contemporary cinema ... and then there`s DUNE. While it might not be one of David`s favorite projects, his collaboration with DP Freddie Francis created a painterly quality and dimension that rendered each frame as a singular work of art.
The commercial? Well it came out just fine, twenty-two effects in sixty seconds. The client loved it, the agency folks loved it and most importantly David was very happy; but that poor little DP-150 camcorder really got tweaked way beyond factory spec.
So now its a few weeks after we wrapped the commercial. We`re back on my porch, drinking some java and nibbling biscotti but this time I`ve got a small tape recorder sitting on the table next to the biscotti.
We`ve all got something that wants to get out. We`ve got a piece of paper and a pencil, and we can write stuff down. It`s all about ideas, and ideas stringing themselves together to make stories or a mood, or whatever. It doesn`t really matter what way you work, or what medium you work in, it`s all about ideas. Sometimes ideas want to be furniture and sometimes they want to be a story in film. Then when you start seeing images they start talking to you.
I did this thing with a Lumiere camera (Lumiere was essentially the first camera/projector. See: http://www.holonet.khm.de/visual_alchemy/lumiere.html). It`s a beautiful camera, and the emulsion has a lot of weird qualities; the flicker, the way the old lenses resolved and the fact that you had to crank it, you could really get into telling a story with that technology.
I`m shooting a series now called Rabbits with a tiny Sony PD-100, and when you see the quality its kind of fuzzy and kind of organic in a way. Its not bad quality just a different, kind of like the Lumiere. So the tools start talking to you and you start getting images with that kind of quality in mind.
Every story, every idea wants to be told a certain way. Now with digital cameras, the really great thing about them is the amount of control you have afterwards to fiddle around and start experimenting and get even more Ideas.
So you see all of these new digital tools we`re using as just fancy pencils?
Yes, but they`re going to develop different types of ideas. Once you start seeing it and acting and reacting with it, it starts talking to you.
THE LOOK
Well, for instance, this last thing we did (Sony PlayStation2 commercial), you tricked the camera and forced it into a profile where the look approached that of film. Once you added those filters and adjusted the camera`s settings, the look started to get real pretty. It forced the camera to go to work.
After we pulled out the noise in post, added grain and timed it, the look got down into that film-like range of mood and sublty. It wasn`t whacking you, it wasn`t blowing out, it was a real nice image and we shot it with a little Sony PD-150 DVCAM. It looks like it was shot on film.
That little camera is a good example of how versatile these new digital tools really are.
PRODUCTION SIZE
One of the more important things about making a film is that you want to limit the distractions so you can fall into that world and be able to focus. One of the nice things about working with the smaller cameras and smaller crews is that it creates fewer distractions and allows this to happen.
While there are definite benefits to the simplification that digital offers, I think that there still a few critical tools that need to be developed and refined. These small cameras don`t move cinematically, they`re light and flimsy. We need a really nice little StediCam and to see more tools like the rigs you made for the PlayStation2 commercial, little stabilizers, little dollies and cranes to make them real smooth and cinematic. Then there`s the obvious tools that filmmakers need like follow focus, and more mechanical interaction.
24P
The really great thing about 24P is that once you print it to film (Arri Laser) it gets really beautiful. No swimming grain and steady, really really steady. I like that. It looks modern but still organic, especially in the fleshtones.
Every story has its own feel and film does talk to me, I love it. Accidents can happen when there`s so many steps to a process and those accidents are sometimes really magical. With digital, I think the accidents happen later, when they go into the computer.
It`s a really great thing that you can just pump it into your computer, no scanning, no conversions, no worry about matching back out, and you don`t need to deal with gate weave because it`s already rock solid. You can just shoot and then go to work in the computer.
There`s just more control in digital. There`s also more room for experimentation and once you`ve learned these programs and they`ve become intuitive, I think that whatever you can think, you can get.
PRICE OF ADMISSION
Again, it`s just like that pencil and paper. Some really great drawings have been done with those tools and also some really bad ones. Everyone has the same access but its all about ideas. In whatever medium it is, you put your thinking cap on, and then stay true to those ideas.
Now, more people have the opportunity to express themselves and really get into another world. Of course there are opportunities here for people who normally wouldn`t have had them, but it`s still about ideas. Your camera, the format, the computer platform are all just the start of it. The rest of it is like the pencil and paper, those ideas have to be realized in the proper way.
I`m a Mac guy. I like Apple, I like the way they think. They`re happy and scrambling forward in a really good way. The software that we`re using, Combution in particular, is really powerful but the learning curve is pretty substantial. You have to take the time to stop everything and go back to school, and work for quite some time before it all becomes intuitive. Hopefully, as the programs become more sophisticated, the user-friendly nature of them will get better, and that will be a beautiful day for people like me.
The introduction of computers and the many new digital recording formats into the movie industry, brings a whole new language, new interfaces, barriers really, to overcome.
NAB
The internet gives people the freedom to express themselves without any kind of outside restraints or rules. In television there`s much less freedom. The old guard is sweating bullets now because they realize that the change is going to happen. The networks are all trying to get some sort of control over the internet but its probably the last time that people can have a free voice. Sure, the quality right now is not so great, but tomorrow, that`s another story. It`ll be screaming fast and great quality. Television, movies, it will all be the same yet you`ll have this freedom and no one will be telling you what to do. You can have your own television station, your own book store, your own gallery, your own record store. Some will do well, some won`t, but nobody will be telling you how to express your ideas.
THE INTERNET
They`re connected by ideas - different ideas, but ideas. I don`t see the connection as technical because I`m not a technical person.
And yet you learned to program in Flash and then started developing your site without really ever doing much web surfing yourself.
Well you see, I`m not really a movie buff, but that doesn`t mean I can`t make movies.
I`ve been working on this site with Eric Bassett for about a year, we`re still not up, but I`ve got about eleven Mac G4 servers. Apple is helping us in many beautiful ways including streaming content and there are some e-commerce applications I`m doing with a French company called 4D.
I`m doing about forty-five minutes of shockwave animation all in MacroMedia Flash. It takes me about sixty hours to do three minutes of Flash animation and then a day or two to mix that three or four minute cartoon.
Are we going to see the reemergence of the Angriest Dog?
I`m going to recycle the nine years of Dog with a weekly update. Then I`ve got two new series. That`s the biggest thing really, to do new things specifically for this site. If you do two series and you update them once a week, and they`re five minute segments, that`s the equivalent of four or five feature films a year.
It`s an experiment. There are little fragments of ideas that people get but if they don`t connect to other fragments they`re just written down somewhere and never realized. The internet allows a person to work out these small fragments. Streaming is all about short bits so we`re seeing a lot of the small fragments, experiments really, being realized now on the internet.
I look around this industry and see people, well established people like yourself, who`ve spent years getting to a point where their work is universally recognized, simply rolling up their sleves and climbing down in the trenches with the rest of us in this bitstream of humanity. How can the internet possibly compete with the personal, creative and financial rewards of your cinematic efforts?
The internet is about freedom, it doesn`t really cost a lot of money to build a site.
Once you build your site you`ve got your own television station, your own theater, your own radio station, your own record store, your own galleryŠ it`s the future. If I have a series and don`t feel like doing one next week, or if I want to do some experiments, I have that freedom.
In television you just have to do a brand new show every week and that causes a lot of negative pressure. There`s still pressure in the internet but it`s a different kind of pressure because you`re driving the boat.
How can you account for the disparity in financial compensation for your time investment? The internet is still in its infancy and aside from the few investors daft enough to invest in the initial smoke and mirrors, we`ve yet to see content generate revenue on a dependable basis.
Pay-per-view. People who build content should be allowed to charge for that commodity. There`s going to be these smart cards and every computer will have a little slot for your digital credit card, you can charge fifty cents, four cents, five hundred and ninety-five dollars, whatever. These are application specific cards so you`re not fiddling around with people`s whole credit histories. Virtualy risk free and speedy. When you want to see something you just click your way to it and bam. I`m hoping that DavidLynch.com will be able to realize some revenue from some parts of the site being pay-per-view.
All of your work, your carpentry, your paintings, your photography, your sound design and even your cinema and broadcast, all have an unmistakable sense of organic fundamentalism about them, and now you`re rigorously embracing digital.
The look you get with digital has a signature that is initially different from the look of cinematic emulsion. Your movies, infact nearly everything that I`ve seen you create, has an unmistakable pallet and ambiance to it that tells us that we`re looking at something that came from the mind of David Lynch. How do you reconcile the extensive pallets of film to the inherent limitations of 4:2:2 and even 4:1:1 video?
As we`ve just seen, there are instances where digital production allows you to use smaller crews.
Now that you`ve had a chance to experience 24P and sort of take its binary pulse as it were, what are your feelings about using it?
For the past hundred years or so, the Hollywood gatekeepers have rigorously controlled access to the both the tools of production and the means of distribution. How do you see digital production changing this?
COMPUTERS
On both of the projects that I`ve worked with you on, we`ve used a combination of Inferno/Flame and Maya on Silicon Graphics and Combustion, Commotion and AfterEffects on the Mac, but you really seem to relate more to Mac.
This year`s subtext of the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) conference was all about the dwindling shelf-life of network TV. Even Sumner Redstone`s keynote address did little to aswage the feeling that networks have only got a few years left before the "dot commandos" steadily erode their market-share. How do you see the emerging distribution mechanisms affecting not only you, but the market in general?
You`re currently in postproduction on your motion picture MULHOLLAND DRIVE which has numerous digital effects. You`ve just finished directing the international roll-out commercial for the Sony PlayStation2 which was shot on DVCAM, and you`re vigorously creating content for your new internet site. All three projects quite different in their scope and yet all connected by a common digital toolset.
