Christopher Nolan Quotes

Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.

Making this movie was a great opportunity for me to explore high-definition. I'm glad I got to see what the challenges are, what makes it better. It works wonderfully.

I've had a really hard time dealing with 35mm. I greatly prefer HD.

A digital camera does have many advantages and I was a believer that digital video would be a big influence on film-making.

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more.

I also make movies that can be seen on a small screen, as I shoot on digital video. Hopefully they can be seen small and can live like that.

The size of a studio film lets you see technology in a way that you wouldn't on an independent film, like the gadgets and the angles and all that.

It might sound odd, but I want to thank Michael Bay because he's been saying how important it is to show 3D with the right luminescence. And that's very important for this film, a lot of which was shot at night or with very low illumination.

I carry my own film guys with me now. People think that's a huge expense, but with technology like it is these days, it's not. You can film videos and everything with a Canon Mark II, and shoot a movie. They're doing it for next to nothing, by comparison. I can do ten videos for a project for the price of one mainstream video in the past.

I'm always secretly the most pleased when a show just really, really looks good and when my camera guys are really happy with the images they got.

I love to play with the gadgets that come with film.

I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don't think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn't there yet.

I don't get tripped up in technology. I use technology as a tool. 'Oldboy' we shot Two Pro 35mm. For 'Da Blood of Jesus,' we shot digitally. We shot the new Sony F55. It's a 4K camera.

I just love the look of film. But I have nothing against HD.

For behaviorist films, that's been much more useful - the change of technology - but for my kind of films, doing them on film is much better, because it's more beautiful.

I'm going to insult a whole industry here, but it seems like TV is for people who can't do film. I'm not talking about actresses; I'm talking about lighting people. Lighting on TV is just so... it's sinful, it really is.

The IMAX cameras are big and heavy. And they're loud. So you have to be mindful of whether or not they're worth it; I'd say the image quality is incredible and the scale is amazing.

Studios are so used to digital now, and there is a mythology that it's cheaper. But it's really not cheaper. For instance, digital is great for night exteriors; everybody knows it's a video tap, so it's very responsive to light. So you can go out at night, shoot with digital, and it's gorgeous, beautiful to look at.

The dynamic range of the digital camera is pretty crappy compared to film, but now film is not great because the labs have closed. It's going to hurt a lot of the movies that we did in this gap because I think they are going to look very old very soon.

That's one of the best things about the RED ONE - I can use all the best lenses that have been used in film forever.

It would be naive to say that you could make a movie on film for the same price you can digitally.

Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.

There's a reason why I use film. It's because it's the best representation of how our eyes work. I really believe that. I think it's better than digital.

Up until the middle to late '60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film's finance, and television won't show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.

Otherwise [digital revolution] hasn't changed my way of filmmaking, I'm not nostalgic in postulating we should still make films on celluloid. I love celluloid but I don't need to continue on celluloid.