Why Is This $75,000,000 Movie Shot on iPhone?
This right here is a photo from the set of “28 Years Later”, a movie with the budget of $75 million. And if you look closely, you'll notice that the camera they're using is an iPhone. There is a lot of secrecy around it as it just finished production, but what we already know is that it's starring Cillian Murphy who is at the height of his career right now, and both the director and cinematographer are Oscar winners. So considering all the talent involved and the fact that this is going to be one of the most expensive horror movies ever made, I couldn't help but wonder why they chose to film it on the same device I use to take photos of my lunch with. So first of all, this is actually the sequel of “28 Weeks Later”, which in itself was the sequel of “28 Days Later”. And that one, other than kicking off its own “Calendar” Cinematic Universe was also a part of the digital film revolution of the late 90s and early 2000s.
I'm not going to go into too much detail, if you're curious about it Keanu Reeves has made a really good documentary called “Side by Side”. But long story short, around that time the industry was starting to slowly get comfortable with using digital cameras. – The idea was that if you shoot digitally, it's cheap, and it absolutely helped fuel the number of films that got made. I remember, though, my first year at Sundance, we had 225 submissions total for the fiction category. You know, a few years later was ten times that. Compared to film digital did not look nearly as good. But what it did is enable a whole generation of up and coming filmmakers to get their foot at the door. Here in Denmark, a new filmmaking movement was born called Dogme 95, which had a manifesto with ten strict rules and aimed to achieve the purest form of film.
And one of the people involved from the very beginning was the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who played a key part by filming the very first dogme film with nothing but a cheap Sony Handycam. – I was just learning how to play with it and I just whipped it around and I got this weird moment of immediacy, of lightness and immediacy, and I looked at the image of- “oh my God, the amazing thing about these cameras – I caught that”. The movie was a hit, and after seeing it and being inspired by it, Danny Boyle who had just finished directing “The Beach”, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, wanted to go back to the basics. – I made a very big Hollywood film, “The Beach”, with Leonardo DiCaprio and a big crew, and it didn't suit me at all. I felt it was too much away from me, really, somehow. So I then saw “The Celebration”, (speaking in danish) – It wasn't so much the film. It wasn't even the look. It was the camera operating, that movement of the camera.
And so I got in touch with the guy who shot it, Anthony Dod Mantle. And I said, “oh, I feel like I'm not doing the right thing anymore”. “Can we do something together?” They had this seemingly impossible challenge of pulling off a post-apocalyptic zombie movie on a very low budget. So they cast Cillian Murphy who was completely unknown at the time and got creative with the production. They had to film the movie with a cheap camcorder that you could just walk into a store and buy. And even by the standards back then, the quality was not great. But because of that, it made it look gritty and authentic. It almost made it feel like a news footage or a documentary.
And that, in combination with completely reinventing the zombie genre, led to the movie becoming a massive box office success. – We would not have been able to achieve the film on film because we had to stop traffic. We didn't have the money to do it, so what we would do is we just hold the traffic briefly. But because we were on these cameras, we could use ten of them because they're so cheap. So you'd only have to stop the traffic for a few minutes and then you would actually have ten shots.
That was an enormous advantage. – I placed cameras around, not coincidentally, not badly and not loosely. I try to control every angle, and I know roughly where it's best, when it's going to be used. But that said, you can let it run a bit, and because it’s digital, you get something. The two of them would then work on a bunch of movies together and continue to experiment with alternative cameras such as GoPros and DSLRs, and now, over two decades later, when all the doors are open and money's no longer an issue, they still chose to use an iPhone. To me, this means two things. One, it is clearly an art direction and a certain look they wanted. And two, a very important validation for the next generation of filmmakers.
We all know that the film industry is famously difficult to get into, and it wasn't even that long ago when the tools you needed were not even accessible. Like, if I wanted to write a song, I could pick a guitar, but if I wanted to make a movie and I didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars for gear, the best I could do would still make me look like an amateur. So as the digital revolution within the industry was happening, it also affected the consumer side of things. DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have been getting insanely good. I mean, this camera that I'm using to film a random YouTube video with is the same one they used to film “The Creator” an actual movie that looked amazing and got played in theaters. Up until this point, though, smartphones were okay, but not quite there. There have already been movies shot entirely on an iPhone and they look fine, but nowadays the gap is getting smaller and smaller.
And to be fair, if we look at that photo from the set again, you'll notice that the iPhone is attached to a very expensive cinema lens, and it is rigged with all kinds of gear. But at its core it's the same phone that an aspiring filmmaker can get, and that would give them a certain confidence in the work they do. – That's what's great about the digital technology, is that it sort of doubles in everything about once every two years. – People love great stories. They like to get into a world and have an experience. And how they get there. It doesn't really matter. – I don't believe for one second that digital imaging or digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling in and of itself, is a wholly human concern.
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