Wim Wenders’ ground-breaking shoot with CineAlta

In 1998, Wim Wenders turned to Digital Betacam for an off-beat movie about an attempt by Ry Cooder to relaunch the careers of an obscure group of Cuban musicians. Acquisition was principally with a DVW-700 PAL DigiBeta camcorder – with numerous DV and DVCAM inserts – and the resulting footage upconverted to high definition and transferred to 35mm for its theatrical release.

The Buena Vista Social Club subsequently won an Oscar nomination in 1999 and Wenders was left with a lasting appreciation of digital technology. Wenders next movie, The Million Dollar Hotel, was shot on 35mm but he was intrigued enough by digital technology to consider it for the subsequent movie. At the time, Sony was also near to completing a brand new format, specifically developed for movie-making; CineAlta 24P HD.

By early 2000, the first prototype camcorders equipped with Panavision’s new lenses – the Primo Digital range specifically developed for CineAlta – were complete. After highly successful tests with Lucasfilm for Star Wars: Episode II, Sony Europe made a special arrangement to accommodate Wenders’ interest in evaluating CineAlta for his forthcoming film.

Trans-European Testing
On a particularly cold January day in Cologne, a small group of people arrived at the airport with a very precious piece of luggage. Accompanying the prototype CineAlta HDW-F900 camcorder were Nolan Murdoch and Benjamin Bergery from Panavision, Reinhard Maurer, Richard Lewis, and Milan Krsljanin from Sony Europe and, from Sony’s Atsugi labs,Yasuhiko Mikami – the man responsible for the product planning of the CineAlta camcorder. Everyone was excited about what Wenders and his Million Dollar Hotel cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, could produce with the prototype camcorder.

A series of test shoots had been planned for various locations in Cologne, but Wenders was so impressed by initial results that he wanted to shoot something for real. The Sony team was invited onto a flight to Dublin where Wenders had just six hours with U2 for a promotional shoot.

The idea for the Million Dollar Hotel belonged to Bono, lead singer of U2, and he’d co-written the film’s script with Nicholas Klein. Naturally, U2 had become involved in the film’s soundtrack album, with three songs by Bono and two by the entire group. Of the latter, The Ground Beneath Her Feet was chosen as the ideal track to promote the movie. Further complicating matters, this song was based on a book of the same name by Salman Rushdie – who also agreed to fly to Dublin to participate in a demanding shoot.

Wenders’ experience with the Buena Vista Social Club meant he knew how quick and flexible digital filmmaking could be, moreover Sony claimed CineAlta was capable of producing 35mm quality results. As Wenders later commented; “Working with people from Sony and Panavision, within a remarkably short timeframe, I was shooting complex scenes quite easily with it.”

In fact, the finished piece would pull together elements from the Dublin shoot as well as the 35mm movie footage. There would even be scenes compositing together elements from both. Das Werk in Germany worked on an opening sequence lifted from The Million Dollar Hotel – wherein a Spacecam looks into windows on different floors – and superimposed CineAlta images of various U2 band members into the various windows.

“I was amazed at the quality of the digital images produced using Sony’s HDW-F900,” says Wenders, “and how well it intercut with the footage shot on 35mm.”

Bravura Reception in Berlin
The Million Dollar Hotel made its premiere two weeks later, at the 50th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won both a Silver Bear and Golden Camera awards. The Ground Beneath Her Feet promotion also had its premiere at a special screening for festival to an overwhelming response.

“The images shot on the 24p are amazingly sharp and detailed,” Wenders claimed. “Depth of focus is much deeper than on comparable film images. Of course the image has a different feel. The absence of grain makes it look more electronic than film. On the other hand, it is miles away as well from ‘video imagery’. 24p has really created a realm of its own, with a look and an aesthetic of its own. In between film and video somehow, and if I would have to judge, I would place it closer to film than to conventional video.”

Phedon Papamichael, who’d never before shot with video, commented that he’d “lit and treated it like film. It's very clean and sharp… What really matters is your eye and your sensibilities for interpreting stories. No technology will ever replace that.”

Wenders agreed about the similarities with 35mm production; “From my own experience, the work on the set will remain very much the same. 24p is demanding, as far as make-up, props and hair is concerned, but it also gives the people responsible for those areas the perfect tool to control their work. Shooting with an HD monitor on the set is truly addictive. It gives you a more complex and more satisfying control over the image than you ever had before.”

Looking to the future, Wenders not only planned to use 24P for his next project, but insisted 24p is a viable alternative to 35mm: “In the long run, there is no question that the new digital medium will replace film.”