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Hateful Eight


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Being I love anything shot on 65mm film, I have great interest in how Tarantino's new "Hateful Eight" film will turn out. I'll see if I can get to a theater that will project it in 70mm. I have read this film is using every 5 perf 65mm camera out there, and Panavision even rebuilt the old cameras and lenses that were used on Ultra Panavision productions. Haven't heard any news on the production since shooting. Anyone have any info or news on this? Any comments?

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There are a couple of pictures out there of them shooting with the two System 65 cameras - the Studio and the HR.

 

I wonder if they're using the Arri 765 as well. I'd like to see the old giant "Silenced Studio Camera" Panavision apparently rebuilt too.

 

Looking forward to watching this in actual 70mm, if I can.

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the sutff in the cabin looks very stagey. A deliberate stylistic choice?

 

Isn't that like asking "when did you stop beating your wife?"

 

If the answer to your question is "no" then it suggests that the filmmakers don't know what they are doing because they got a look they didn't choose deliberately, and if the answer is "yes" then it implies that the basic premise of the question is legitimate, that the movie looks stagey in a negative way (generally no one uses the term "stagey" in a positive way, when they want to, they'd use a more neutral term like "stylized" or "theatrical").

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Production has been very quiet. No still's, no real reports on how things went. Even the lab's been pretty quiet.

 

 

There is an interesting interview with Quentin where he sounds a bit more subdued about everything including the new movie.

I would have thought he would be really excited to be doing the whole 70mm thing but he doesn't seem that excited by how it has come out.

Personally I think it looks great visually going on the trailer but obviously maybe Quentin is concerned about how the movie is working out as a whole.

 

He hasn't had a great time what with the script being leaked and everything tho.

 

You can read the interview here:

 

http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/quentin-tarantino-lane-brown-in-conversation.html?mid=twitter-share-vulture

Edited by Freya Black
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Pretty interesting interview. I think Tarantino just gets frustrated with the shifting culture as a whole. And in using such old lenses and technology in production, I don't know, maybe there could have been some obstacles to overcome. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure the film will be remarkable, but that's coming from a Tarantino fanboy.

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Yea, I read that yesterday and I take it with a grain of salt.

 

I've been in his place before, the last thing you want to do is be interviewed when your in the middle of cutting something. Your mind is focused on the cutting, not the stupid questions the interviewer is asking. He clearly had no interest in doing the interview, some of his answers were like "I'm done with this" so I assume that's why he seems frustrated.

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I didn't put that very well.

 

I didn't mean stagey in a negative way, just that it looks like it was shot on a stage. I definitely didn't mean stylized, because the whole trailer is _very_ stylized.

 

I guess my real question is, assuming they've made the interiors look deliberately like they were shot on a stage/not in a real location, why have they done that?

Is it some reference I don't get? Is that how a lot of classic westerns were shot?

Edited by Mei Lewis
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I've been watching some classic westerns recently and no, they weren't shot like that.

 

Honestly, I'm very much into motivated lighting and I don't see much coming from that main set. However, we won't know until we see the film. Perhaps there are holes in the roof everywhere and that's why we see shafts of light coming down. I'm reserving judgement until I see the film.

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I moved from Alaska to LA just to be able to see this movie in 70mm. I don't think there is a single celuloid projector left in that state, let alone a 70mm. Maybe that is an exageration, but never let the truth get in the way of a good story. So archlight? Is that the call in LA for 70mm, or is there a better theater?

 

(also did RR change from northface to canadian goose down? I don't think I can critisize him on any cinemagraphic choice, but good on him for the CGD. That certainly isn't a working mans Carhart. I've seen many a man start out with any other brand to find himself $1300 lighter with CGD as his armor)

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Since the film is being shot in 2.76:1 aspect ratio, the only screens which are setup for this are curved one's like the cinerama dome. So there are only 3 theaters in the US really capable of projecting the film as it was meant to be and the cinerama dome in Hollywood is one of them.

 

My only worry is the anamorphic presentation. Since it's a curved screen, there needs to be a curved lens. The cinerama dome has one for 35/70, but I'm not sure if they have one for anamorphic 70. Having seen test footage, it's going to look amazing in 70mm. It's absolutely not so amazing in digital.

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I've been watching some classic westerns recently and no, they weren't shot like that.

 

Honestly, I'm very much into motivated lighting and I don't see much coming from that main set. However, we won't know until we see the film. Perhaps there are holes in the roof everywhere and that's why we see shafts of light coming down. I'm reserving judgement until I see the film.

 

The shafts of light is something Robert Richardson does in a lot of his movies often with no motivation.

It can be seen on the tables in Inglorious Basterds,Kill Bill,Django Unchained and even Eat,Pray,Love. I have no idea why he likes doing that.

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More details thanks to an article from Indywire : http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/how-quentin-tarantino-resurrected-ultra-panavision-70-for-the-hateful-eight-roadshow-20150828

The comeback of motion picture film will literally get its biggest boost yet with the Ultra Panavision 70 release of celluloid defender Quentin Tarantino's post-Civil War Western "The Hateful Eight."

Shot on 65mm film with classic Panavision lenses in the widest aspect ratio of 2.76:1, this marks the first anamorphic 70mm theatrical release in nearly 50 years. The two-week roadshow engagement in 50 theaters (with the Cinerama Dome in contention for LA, of course) will be the best holiday gift for cinephiles.

"The Hateful Eight" will also pit three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson ("Hugo," "The Aviator," "JFK") in a shoot-out with Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, who's going for a third Oscar in a row for his own frozen wilderness adventure, "The Revenant," from "Birdman" director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. (Both films are racing to the editorial finish line for a Christmas Day release.)

Richardson proclaimed that Ultra Panavision 70 more than reinforces the notion that film can coexist with digital: it provides such unparalleled scope, resolution and beauty that everyone should be using it. "When we saw Sam Jackson in a closeup -- or anyone -- it just aided the skin. It's remarkable. We never used diffusion, the only filters we ever did were outside. It was stunning."

Feeding off "Stagecoach," "The Desperate Hours" and "And Then There Were None," Tarantino's ninth film throws eight travelers together a decade after the Civil War in Wyoming. But a bitter snowstorm prevents them from getting to Red Rock, where bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) intends to bring feral-like fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to justice. The ensemble also includes Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern.

Tarantino touted seven minutes of footage at Comic-Con through the raging blizzard and then inside a stagecoach stop just outside Red Rock called Minnie's Haberdashery (which we reported). According to Dern, "He has the greatest attention to detail on a set as any director who ever lived, his only rival would be Luchino Visconti. He creates an atmosphere for all of us not to do our greatest work necessarily, but to get better."

The last Ultra Panavision 70 release was "Khartoum" (1966), the biopic with Charlton Heston as British Gen. Charles Gordon. The list also includes "Ben-Hur," "Mutiny on the Bounty," "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," "The Fall of the Roman Empire," "The Greatest Story Ever Told" and "The Battle of the Bulge."

In fact, Panavision took Tarantino into a screening room and surprised him with the chariot race from "Ben-Hur," starting with the sides at the normal width and then spread out to expose the full frame -- and the film nerd was totally hooked on Ultra Panavision 70.

But this all began accidentally: "We went in thinking we were going to shoot standard format for 65mm and one day I was with Gregor Tavenner, my first camera assistant, and Dan Sasaki [Panavision VP of optical engineering] was showing us standard Panavision lenses for 65mm and while looking at them, I slipped behind the curtain and saw this shelf filled with odd-shaped lenses [triangular with prisms]. They were Ultra Panavision lenses," Richardson said.

Sasaki put the lenses up on the projector and Richardson was hooked. Even before testing the lenses, Panavision threw all its weight behind the project, and Kodak and the FotoKem lab were on board as well.

First came testing by Richardson in freezing temperatures while scouting locations in Telluride, Colorado that would benefit them visually, with great mountain vistas. Panavision had to reconfigure and apply new coatings to 19 lenses for focus-pulling. Panavision also made a 2,000-foot magazine for the film cameras to accommodate Tarantino's penchant for long takes. The camera's limit fell just under that length, yet this was still considerably longer than the normal 1,000-ft. magazine could handle.

The team brought a very analogue approach to shooting in Telluride (with few blizzards and rare overcast days) and onstage at LA's Red Studios, where they lowered the temperature to 30 degrees. They screened dailies in 70mm, with no digital intermediate, and the film is being color-timed photochemically, the old-school way, by FotoKem.

Theaters will be retrofitted with anamorphic lenses for 70mm projectors. Yes, there will be a digital release from TWC on January 8, 2016, which will continue to show the film in 70mm as well.

With two cameras at his disposal, and Tarantino operating a couple of shots himself, Richardson had to get used to certain anomalies: slight color alterations when shooting actors' faces after switching lenses — ranging from the triangular ones that provide a bronze look to more user-friendly cylindrical shapes — or odd flaring caused by light bouncing indirectly off the prism when shooting two characters in front of a fireplace.

"The most complex thing for me was that the set was primarily this one building where they arrive in this stagecoach," Richardson explained. "But if you shoot a medium shot with the lenses, anywhere you're seeing two-thirds or more of the room, depending on where the character is, because it's such a wide frame. You're lighting the entire set and other characters are constantly in your frame. Quentin first looked at 'Mad, Mad World'. Part of what happened in that film is that you had a medium shot with all the characters in the frame. It was an adjustment for all of us."

Indoors were lit warm and exteriors cool. Sasaki also altered the lenses for sharpness in closer shots (within three feet). "Quentin likes to shoot a lot of masters because his films are dialogue-driven. We worked with all primes. He accepted what 65mm allowed him. There are more characters in the frame -- at least four in one shot -- and he could see the quality of the image and quick adjustments could be made for makeup and hair [as a result of the 70mm dailies]. We all knew we had limitations and there would be breakdowns with the 65mm camera because they're not used often, but overall there very few problems with the equipment," Richardson said.

Because of the film's claustrophobic, lowly lit nature, however, the use of Ultra Panavision was actually counter-intuitive. But Tarantino wasn't about to turn down this rare historical opportunity. In a clever game of hide-and-seek, he used the frame to deliberately show more or less when he wanted to obscure crucial character information.

"There's a great deal of interior landscape available and the actors loved it. Also, I think they enjoyed the visual feast that was given to them in terms of their own faces," said Richardson, who admitted, though, that throwback photochemical color timing has been frightening.

"I'd become reliant on a digital intermediate for fixing things in post and you can let certain things go. For example, you realize that the backgrounds are blown out but you don't want to take the time to put a hard gel up. You know you can rescue that with the window and tracking, or if your weather doesn't quite match, it's easier to work a look between sunny and overcast.

"In this particular case, there was no fixing: what you shoot is what you get. You're not going in to fix a wall if you didn't put enough light on it; if you're overexposed on that side with sun, you're gonna have sun. There's nothing you can do. So Quentin worked very hard in collaboration in trying to make sure the weather conditions were what he wanted for sequences. And he helped me a great deal in that way. Ordinarily, he says to me, 'If they're looking at your work, they're not listening to my words.' He's going to go for the best performance regardless of the condition of the light."

But not when it came to this gorgeous look. And this is just the beginning, as Gareth Edwards' "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" is reportedly being shot with Ultra Panavision 70 lenses.

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Shafts of light can most certainly be motivated lighting. But perhaps not from above.

 

I am myself sick of indie naturalism, handheld, sun flares, 5d hipster aesthetics. Anything that breaks us away from that, I'm all for. And I say this as a pretty naturalistic lighter.

 

I'm someone who doesn't enjoy Quentin Tarantino movies, but I will make an exception for this just for the Panavision 70 stuff. Saw a trailer at the cinema the other day and I have to say, it looked great on the big screen.

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