Steve McQueen seems a little het up. The Oscar-winning film-maker is contemplating the shifting sands of the movie industry—specifically, the relentless drip-feed of new digital film formats. “All this technology, it’s changing every five minutes,” he says, “because someone’s making some money out of it.”
He talks about old-fashioned reel-to-reel film, a medium he has used since he picked up a Super 8 camera as a student at Goldsmiths in London (his first movie was of his bus ride home) and that he now appears to regard as a kind of muse. “There’s something romantic about film,” he says. “Some sort of magic—it’s almost like it breathes. Film feels much more...I don’t know. Maybe ‘human’?”
You hear this kind of reverie quite often in Hollywood these days. We may live in an age of bits and bytes but six out of the nine Best Picture nominees at the Oscars this year were mainly or entirely shot on film—not digital—cameras. Tinseltown’s creative classes are a nostalgic bunch and for more than a century their world was ruled by celluloid, the medium in which movies were shot, edited, and distributed to theaters. Many will tell you that there are aspects of traditional film that a digital file just can’t re-create.
