While director Christopher Nolan sees the advantages of working with IMAX technology for movie-making, the director says he’s not a fan of 3-D and that he has no plans to embrace it in the near future.
The director says that he was asked if he’d like to make his upcoming thriller “Inception” in 3-D but he says he passed.
“I’m not a huge fan of 3D,” Nolan said. Nolan even resisted the temptation to convert the film to 3-D once it was done. Nolan says that while it appears a certain segment of the audience is embracing 3-D, there may be a segment that is getting 3-D fatigue (apparently he listens to the show….)
“We did tests on ‘Inception’ to look at the post conversion process,” he revealed. “And they worked very well. It’s quite easy to do, in fact. But it takes a little time, and we didn’t have the time to do it to the standard that I would have been happy.”
Nolan says that he finds the dimness of 3-D images “alienating” and that he has no plans to start shooting in 3-D any time soon. He will shoot the third Batman using the 2-D process and IMAX cameras.
At a screening of “Inception” over the weekend, Nolan went on to say that while he sees the value of CGI in creating some effects, he feels that filmmakers should use actual effects when possible.
According to reports, the scene in “Inception” with a spinning room wasn’t created with CG, but with actual spinning sets.
“The audience can always, on some level, tell the difference,” he said.
When he was making “Batman Begins,” Nolan asked the visual effects guys to use CGI to re-create a scene he had shot practically. The shots looked almost identical, he said, and almost no one could tell the difference. “(But) When they had to do a shot from nothing, the quality level was far, far lower,” he said.
He also believes that actors do much better work when their performances are based in the real world.
Nolan went on to say that he doesn’t play much attention to the Internet (so maybe he isn’t listening to the show…but he should!).
He said he realized early on that going on the Net wasn’t helpful to his sanity, especially when it comes to the casting rumors that fly about this Batman movies.
That led to one of his more interesting revelations: “I don’t email or use a cell. It gives me time to think.”
You mean that there are folks in Hollywood who hate 3D for the sake of 3D? say it ain’t so!
Thank You Chris Nolan!
Well said, sir.
If it isn’t right for the movie, then OF COURSE, DON’T DO IT. If it’s just because you hate the format, then by definition, your movies aren’t probably right for 3D anyway. So either way, this is non-news. You’re not doing 3D? Whoop. Now, I hope your movie is good because it still looks like a Dark City knock-off.