The Hateful Eight Featurette - Ultra Panavision

I swear I will drive up to 5-hours away to see this projected on 70mm.

All through the 90's I lived near a spectacular 70mm theater in Chicago and several times I went to see the same movie in both 70mm and 35mm and KAPOW!!!! The 70mm was like a whole other universe of experience!
To me it's worth double the ticket price any day of the week and on any movie. It's THAT good.
(Although a mile-wide screen sure doesn't hurt! :laugh:)
 
I have never seen an actual 70mm theater, is the screen ratio the same (and they crop the image) or they have custom sized screen to match films format (aspect ratio of 2.20:1)?
 
Stoked we'll have it in Glorious[SUP]TM [/SUP]70mm at the Astor here in Melbourne. Really looking forward to it.
 
emretufekci said:
I have never seen an actual 70mm theater, is the screen ratio the same (and they crop the image) or they have custom sized screen to match films format (aspect ratio of 2.20:1)?
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The screen IS THAT WIDE.
And it's GLORIOUS.
By the 1990's there were VERY few of these left.
Even seeing films at the Director's Guild in Hollywood pales in comparison to that huge 70mm screen.
BTW - the theater was called McClurg Court. I know it was one of the larger ones, but they were all wonderful.
 
Hateful backlight

Hateful backlight

Not to rain on any parades, 70mm or otherwise, I was speaking with a Hollywood DP about lighting and he mentioned the lighting in Hateful Eight. He said he hated the lighting, in specific the manner in which people indoors are heavily back lit from above. ( see trailer ). While I agree that heavy backlighting indoors ( what I call "soap opera lighting " ) does not suit my taste, I could see it being appropriate for Hateful Eight since, going by the trailer, the film is cartoonish. The heavy backlighting that is unjustified by any source works to make the characters more 3-D, more comic-book like. It certainly is not a natural look.

Did anyone else notice how few sets are in the trailers? Just about every scene is either from that lodgehouse or the stagecoach sequences in the snow.

This may be of interest to you:

"Tarantino explains why he thinks 70mm is better than digital."

http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/26/tarantino-explains-70mm-is-better/

I tend to agree and you likely will as well. However, at the risk of being cynical, there is little interest in "better quality" these days. We live in a world that emphasizes cheap, convenient, easy, fast, disposable, and adequate. Many people watch films primarily on a smart phone. They could care less about the quality of the image. I applaud Tarantino for shooting on film, but this is a digital world and one that will only become increasingly digital. Shooting on film, on 70mm in particular, is now just an anachronistic exercise.
 
I hate to say that the only movie I've seen in 70mm is Transformers (blech!) but hey it was part of a double feature at Bengie's Drive In just outside of Baltimore and we had kids with us. But I'll be damned if it wasn't the most epic feeling sitting under the largest screen in the US.
 
DPStewart said:
The screen IS THAT WIDE.
And it's GLORIOUS.
By the 1990's there were VERY few of these left.
Even seeing films at the Director's Guild in Hollywood pales in comparison to that huge 70mm screen.
BTW - the theater was called McClurg Court. I know it was one of the larger ones, but they were all wonderful.
Click to expand...
Is the Mcclure Court gone? I saw the restored Lawrence of Arabia there when I was in college back in the 80s. A religious experience.

People should note that there is 70mm and there is Ultra Panavision 70. "Regular 70mm" is a 65mm film negative with a 2.20 aspect ratio. The print is 70mm to accommodate the multiple audio tracks. Ultra Panavision 70 is a format shot on the same 65mm negative but with a mildly anamorphic lens that resulted in a s u p e r w i d e aspect ratio of 2.76. It is a crazy-wide format shot on a very large negative that results in an immersive filmgoing experience. Note that only IMAX currently delivers a larger film negative, but it is not particularly a widescreen format.

The Hateful Eight is only the 11th feature produced in Ultra Panavision 70, and I think I'll make the effort to see it in that format. I'm lucky enough to live in New York where that won't be too difficult.

Next up, someone needs to revive the production format of Abel Gance's Napoleon.
 
i understand that lighting and sets and color are all artistic choice here but so far everything i have seen looks like bad TV to me, there is absolutely zero mood....i don't care how big or how small the negative or sensor is, i just can't get over the 80?s 90?s aesthetics......
 
Mitch Gross said:
Is the Mcclure Court gone? I saw the restored Lawrence of Arabia there when I was in college back in the 80s. A religious experience.

People should note that there is 70mm and there is Ultra Panavision 70. "Regular 70mm" is a 65mm film negative with a 2.20 aspect ratio. The print is 70mm to accommodate the multiple audio tracks. Ultra Panavision 70 is a format shot on the same 65mm negative but with a mildly anamorphic lens that resulted in a s u p e r w i d e aspect ratio of 2.76. It is a crazy-wide format shot on a very large negative that results in an immersive filmgoing experience. Note that only IMAX currently delivers a larger film negative, but it is not particularly a widescreen format.

The Hateful Eight is only the 11th feature produced in Ultra Panavision 70, and I think I'll make the effort to see it in that format. I'm lucky enough to live in New York where that won't be too difficult.

Next up, someone needs to revive the production format of Abel Gance's Napoleon.
Click to expand...

MITCH!
I was at that showing of Lawrence of Arabia! (well one of the few screenings they gave it) and THAT was THE REASON I became interested in cinematography and film-making in general!

Were you going to Columbia? Or Northwestern? (Or are you the DePaul type?)

Yeah, McClurg Court closed in 2003. It's freakin' APARTMENTS now...

There is supposedly some development of 1 theater happening there but it's not screening anything as of yet.

That main 70mm room could seat 1,000 people. Can you IMAGINE THAT folks? Man...that was my heaven. The ONE place in Chicago where I felt totally at peace.


HUMANITY IS EVOLVING BACKWARDS DAMMIT!
 
Paul schefz said:
i understand that lighting and sets and color are all artistic choice here but so far everything i have seen looks like bad TV to me, there is absolutely zero mood....i don't care how big or how small the negative or sensor is, i just can't get over the 80?s 90?s aesthetics......
Click to expand...

I was thinking the exact same thing but I was reluctant to offend any Tarantino fanboys. Now that you have paved the way, I'll let loose! Going by the trailer Hateful Eight looks pretty lame. I don't see anything new here from Tarantino. As one reviewer put it: "Comic book characters that appeal to 13 yr old boys." This isn't visionary filmmaking and it isn't even original. I'd love to see something from Tarantino along the lines of No Country For Old Men but maybe that doesn't interest him and possibly he isn't capable as a result of his OCD. More Samuel Jackson loud-talking. Ugh. I get more than enough of that from his Capital One commercials.

The "bad tv" lighting is what my DP friend was referring to. The new Bond film, as weak as it may be, has a more cinematic aesthetic than does Hateful Eight, from what we are shown in the trailers. Glorious 70mm content that, outside of some scenics, is just Tarantino cowboy schlock where every character's lines sound like something Quentin would say to try to impress as being clever and pseudo-philosophical. Oh, and blood and extreme violence. Can't leave that out of any QT offering.
 
I side with the skeptics on this one. I don't know if "Revenant" will be great or not, but the trailer crushes the one for "Hateful Eight." When they spend this much time flogging the format, it makes me wonder about the elements that really count.

This movie is in Dolby 9.2 and 3D!!!! Uh-oh.
 
Cinematography, like it or not, follows trends. There's no reason to assume that today's aesthetic is the last, final and everlasting one, that what is considered beautiful today will look somewhat of-its-time ten or twenty years down the road. Bob Richardson pioneered his own look decades ago with the screaming hot, perfectly centered backlight-with-diffusion seen in "JFK", "Casino" and many others. It wasn't following the current trend of the day and it may have sometimes stuck out as odd or self-conscious, but it was bold and always a choice.

Today we are deep into a naturalistic trend, where technology has allowed us to capture images under available lighting as never before, where the handheld, stripped down, mixed-source look migrates from the indie world to studio features and back again. A single big soft source with no fill is the benchmark. In the midst of all that comes the look that Richardson selected for this film, and it does seem surprising, but I myself am going to see it with an open mind. For all we know this could spark a shift towards a more stylized look. Backlight could become cool again, simply because it is different and we've been doing the non-backlight thing for many years now. So, THIS particular "Hollywood DP" ain't gonna judge the look from the trailer--looking forward to getting inside Richardson's mind for a couple of hours in a dark theater (and sure hoping to catch the roadshow version).
 
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Northwestern U., Class of '89.

Bob Richardson's work has long been fairly stylized, also Eat, Pray, Love was a return to somewhat "traditional" photography. You might not be into it just as you might not be into Tarantino's equally-stylized work. Me, I don't like to eat steak every meal. Sometimes a nice lobster is what's in order.

There's room for everything, done well. I wouldn't want all films to be made in a Tarantino/Richardson style, but I wouldn't want no films to be made that way either.
 
Charles- I would not judge the look of a film by the trailer but one can judge the look of the images in a trailer on their own. Not sure if expressing a personal dislike for a style is necessarily "judging" anyway. Saying you don't care for broccoli isn't judging broccoli and it isn't judging anyone who happens to like broccoli.

As I said prior, the heavy backlight look, imo, adds to the comic-book nature of the characters and the film. From what I gather not having yet seen the film, it isn't a realist film and the lighting is fittingly un-realist. Tarantino, generally speaking, doesn't create characters that were likely to have existed in the real world. That just isn't his thing. Regardless of the nature of the film it is awesome that Tarantino is attempting to revive 70mm but the realist in me says that such is folly, albeit noble and valiant folly. Good thing for 70mm fans that Tarantino, like his films, isn't realistic.
 
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