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MillimeterClint's Collaborators
Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Inside the continuing evolution of a digital post pipeline.
Director Clint Eastwood (far left) and Cinematographer Tom Stern (second from left) prepare a shot from Changeling, filmed using Kodak Vision 500T 5279 stock.
The remarkably efficient Clint Eastwood filmmaking machine keeps marching along with, at press time, three feature films in various states of progress. As Eastwood began marketing his current film, Changeling, he was posting his end-of-year release, Gran Torino, and just launching preproduction on his 2009 Nelson Mandela biopic, The Human Factor. The three projects come on the heels of Eastwood's back-to-backWorld War II films that were produced more or less concurrently a couple of years ago: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The scheduling, logistics, and creative intent of those two films (as documented by millimeter) required certain incremental changes in how Eastwood's pipeline works, such as his embracement of the digital-intermediate process for the first time. His new slate of films have further evolved pieces of that pipeline.
Rather than radically departing from his traditional methods, however, Eastwood tends to strategically make subtle changes when circumstances require them, and then decide later if those changes should be permanently incorporated into his system. As the Gran Torino DI was about to start recently, millimeter caught up with four of Eastwood's key collaborators to discuss the current state of that system and how it was applied on Changeling and Gran Torino. Those collaborators: his longtime DP Tom Stern, co-editor Joel Cox, his technical producer Rob Lorenz, and Technicolor Digital Intermediates colorist Jill Bogdanowicz.
Shooting traditionally
Eastwood's first decision was to continue shooting all three movies on 35mm film, as usual. Although he experimented with HDV camera systems for certain action sequences in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima and has expressed interest in shooting digitally from a philosophical point of view, Eastwood simply had no creative need to involve them in any of these three films, according to Tom Stern. Nor could he justify switching his acquisition procedures on account of speed and efficiency, considering his productions already operate at maximum efficiency — Changeling was shot over a period of 45 days in late 2007, and Gran Torino was filmed in just 33 days this summer. But that is not to say he isn't seriously investigating the concept.
“Shooting digitally does interest Clint from the point of view of making the image-capture process less invasive to the drama and the performance,” Stern says. “But it has to fit the way that he works specifically. If he could get a camera that was smaller or quieter or less obtrusive that would basically run forever without needing to reload, with comparable quality, that is something that would interest him a lot just in the sense of taking acting out of the industrial environment of slating and reloading and all that stuff.
“But the cameras aren't really there yet for the other things that are important to him, although they are getting closer, so we're watching them closely. In our setup, we have a reputation for being really fast, and the problem with a lot of the digital solutions is that they are not as fast as we are yet. That's because the stability and the complexity of the downstream part of the equation isn't quite there yet. As it gets resolved, I'm sure we'll get more involved.”
