By Jon Silberg, December 23, 2006
Following the 2001 release of David Lynch's last feature film, Mulholland Drive, the iconoclastic director spent a lot of his time using consumer- and prosumer-grade video equipment to create content for his Web site, Davidlynch.com, and falling in love with a new way of working in the process. The tiny cameras that he could hold in his own hand, the minimal crew, the speed of working, the ability to experiment on set-all these factors inspired him to use Mini DV cameras, specifically the Sony DSR-PD150, for an entire feature film. He worked on that film, which eventually became Inland Empire, starring Laura Dern and Jeremy Irons, for nearly four years in bits and pieces, writing and then shooting small sections at a time.
Inland Empire has played in several cities, essentially self-distributed by the filmmaker, to wildly divergent responses ranging from unbridled praise to sheer contempt. Even those who've raved about the film will admit it has no real storyline per se, and what are to some technical imperfections are to others the artifacts of an exciting new kind of moviemaking.
To Lynch, the important thing is that the tools let him put on screen the ideas he wanted to put there without having to deal with many of the issues that come into play in even the more "indie" of his productions shot on film. "The word 'experiment' marries to the word 'expense' when you're working with film," he says. "With DV, experimenting is something you can do on your own. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money. It's really a freedom thing."
He was impressed with the PD150 as soon as he tried one out prior to starting Inland Empire. "The price was right and what it could do was right for this," he says. As the sporadic shoots in various Southern California locations and in Lodz, Poland, progressed, a number of other interesting Mini DV cameras came along, but, says the director, "I didn't want to change horses in mid-stream."
One of the most exciting aspects for Lynch about shooting video instead of film is the ability to see results instantly. An enthusiastic adopter of digital picture and sound editing, Lynch loves to experiment with unusual ways of marrying images and sound elements together. On Inland Empire, he could take a similar approach to working on set with actors. "With film, you have to wait to see the result. On Inland Empire, if an actor was doing something different or if the light from a window suddenly got stronger, I could see immediately what the effect would be."
Though Norwegian filmmaker Odd-Geir Saether did some lighting, there are a number of credited electricians and several people operated cameras, Lynch relied very little on the contribution of what would traditionally be called the cinematographer. "You light with a few bulbs, some cardboard, tiny bounce things," Lynch says. "Sometimes you might rent a small movie light if the sunlight needs to look stronger inside or something, but we didn't use any big lamps at all."
He says that the ability to see right there on set what the few small light sources could do allowed him to get nice effects by slightly repositioning lights or actors. The camera's ability to see deep into shadows meant he didn't need much power at all to supplement the available light. Even streetlights in the middle of the night could give him more than enough exposure, so then it was more a question of getting some modeling and dimensionality to the lighting to help it along. "So many times you make a tiny [camera] move and the light is just doing wondrous things and you're seeing exactly what you have. If you like it, you go right away. If you're not happy, then you figure out a way to change it."
And he's willing to push things further to the edge if he can see the effect in his viewfinder than he would if he had to imagine what it would look like in the next day's film rushes. "I may want to put less light on a face than some cinematographers would want to. Maybe I can see a glint in someone's eye and not much other detail. I might not want to fiddle with that. Now, in film, a cinematographer will say, 'Take a look through the contrast glass because you're not going to see what you see through the camera.' So you pull up the contrast glass and you say, 'My God. It's totally black!' But shooting digitally, you actually see exactly how the look is working for the scene."
Now would be a good time to point out that, for better or for worse, Lynch did not work with the tools that many cinematographers and videographers would insist are necessary to make just these kinds of judgments. "What's a scope?" he asks in response to one query. And a high-end monitor shielded from stray light? "Well, no," he says. "We had some monitors, but they weren't expensive ones, that's for sure. Mostly I just used the eyepiece in the camera. I would make sure to put on my glasses," he adds.
Yes, there are shots in Inland Empire that are flat-out blurry, but there is also an ethereal beauty to much of the film, so it's up to the viewer to decide what's acceptable and what's not
. In fact, Lynch had the camera set on autofocus for the entire shoot and now cannot imagine going back to having focus pullers with tape measures, focus marks and elaborate follow-focus devices.
"Someone brought a new high-def camera up to the house a while ago to show it to me, and I looked at something on the lens and said, 'What is that thing?' And he said, 'That's the focus knob.' And I said, 'You don't have automatic focus?' And he said, 'No.'
"I didn't want to be mean to this man," Lynch says after a considered pause, "but I wouldn't buy this camera if it was the last camera in the world! I don't care if the lens buzzes 15 times [to search for focus] in the middle of the shot. It'll get it and I can float around the set and be inside the scene without having somebody there focusing the lens." Working that way after his experience using the PD150 on autofocus, he says, would be like "the theater of the absurd!"
For most of the work, he also used auto exposure and auto white balance, preferring imperfection and perhaps occasional exposure changes within shots to the time and cost involved in using traditional methods. Again, the resulting images are available for audiences to make their own aesthetic judgments.
The director admits the camera and minimalist lighting took some getting used to for the actors. "They'd walk on the set and they'd see a 'toy,'" he recalls. "Like it isn't serious. They'd be thinking, 'Oh my God, what's happening?' And then there are stories about digital [cinematography making] actresses look ugly. Then, as we would go along, you could see them change because you've got all this time now to get into a scene. The little camera comes up and it's not like a giant B-52 bomber moving in on you. You can get in there with the actors and catch a thing and hold it.
"And you can turn around so easily, so the scene doesn't get broken," he adds. "It's really beautiful, and when [actors] go to their trailer, it may be for five minutes instead of five hours. On a film shoot, a horrible thing happens where it becomes so hard to bring a person to the set from their trailer. The waiting is dying. It's a horror! This way of working is so friendly to scenes."
Lynch edited the material himself using Final Cut Pro. He chose the system because it was what he learned when he started making shorts for his site and because it did what he needed it to do. Credited as a sound designer on the film, Lynch oversaw the creation of the audio tracks, which were built and mixed in Pro Tools at Lynch's recording studio with sound editors/mixers Dean Hurley and Ronald Eng.
Once the entire three-hour film was edited and output into its native Mini DV format and the audio mixed, the final mastering and film out (the most high-end steps in the process) commenced at FotoKem in Burbank. Lynch has nothing but high praise for the lab. "I love the quality I get there, and the attitude of the people is very positive," he says, adding, "They are happy campers over at FotoKem."
The show couldn't afford the lab's DI suite, so the work was done as a tape-to-tape color correct with Colorist George Koran mastering to HD. While he wasn't working with DPX files, the 4K DLP projector or the lookup tables used in the facility's DI rooms, the director had already tested the Mini DV-to HD-to film workflow there and was content that he could get what he needed. "I'd looked at things in that $30,000 monitor in the HD telecine bay and then at the same thing projected after it had been put on 35mm film, and they looked pretty doggone close," he notes.
Lynch started out asking Koran to try different things with the da Vinci 2K Plus so he could get a feel for what was and was not possible starting from this Mini DV image. "I'd just ask to see it with more contrast or warmer or cooler. I like to know in the beginning what the parameters are. Some scenes were just straight ahead color correcting if there was a problem, and other times we would tweak things and experiment and see where we could take it. We were able to do some interesting things with the color and contrast. Sometimes we used them, and other times I really liked the effect but decided to use it in some other scene-or maybe it didn't work for Inland Empire but gave me an idea I could use in another film."
Lynch is not unaware of the technical aspects of his film that some people might have problems with, but he points out that it would not have been possible to make Inland Empire the way he did-writing and shooting piecemeal over many years-as a film shoot. "It's like if you look at the very early films shot on 35mm film, they have a different feel, a different quality from today's films on 35. This digital video technology is just getting better and better, and soon more and more people are going to work this way. This is just the very early days of a new kind of filmmaking."
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