The digital-movie revolution is marching to a tried-and-true revolutionary theme: The workers have access to the means of production — that is, shooting and editing on digital video, which is much cheaper and easier than filming on traditional celluloid.
Lowering the financial barriers to filmmaking surely should open some creative floodgates, but the more interesting question is whether digital video will change the nature of the movies themselves.
Mike Figgis’ “Time Code,” which opens Friday at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, answers with a resounding yes. Here is a movie that looks nothing like what you’ve previously seen in a commercial theater.
Figgis, an unapologetically arty director whose track record includes hits (the unflinching “Leaving Las Vegas”) and misses (the pretentious “The Loss of Sexual Innocence”), essentially has shot four movies simultaneously on four different digital video cameras — one operated by him — that follow characters in Los Angeles as their stories intersect.
These films are projected, in sync, onto a screen divided into quadrants, so you’re watching all four at once. Figgis directs your attention by turning up the soundtrack on the quadrant where the most important action is occurring at that moment; you’ll hear an argument taking place in the upper right corner while characters stewing in the back seat of a car in the lower left corner are muted.
Adding to the novelty, each of the four films comprises one unbroken 93-minute take, which means that you’re watching the longest tracking shot in commercial-film history times four.
Figgis, in town last week to present a screening of the film, said he simply couldn’t have made “Time Code” without digital video.
“The key thing would have been the timing,” the British director said. “The camera that I used is actually the only professional camera on the market that will run for 90 minutes or two hours. The video cameras run a maximum of 40 minutes. And film, if you’re shooting Super 16, the maximum would be about 20 minutes, and regular 35 [-millimeter] about nine.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” for instance, gives the impression of being one long shot but actually was filmed in approximately 10-minute takes that were spliced together in the spots where the camera would pass by a dark area, like a doorway.
Figgis experimented with long takes and split-screen effects in his previous film, “Miss Julie,” which was filmed on Super 16 and given a very limited release earlier this year. He said that experience led him to wonder about making an entire “video film” in one long take, “and then I came up with the idea of the four cameras.”
“The original idea,” he said, “was almost as a performance-art kind of film, where you’d shoot it, say, on a Friday morning, feature-length, advertise it in [London’s] Time Out or the Guardian, and just say, `Mike Figgis is shooting a feature on Friday morning and it’s going to be premiered that night at such-and-such a space, tickets available at blah blah blah.’ . . . And then I was going to show it on four monitors and have maybe some live musicians actually playing the score.”
Then he wondered, “What if you actually shot a real film that way and went into a higher level?”
So Figgis assembled his crew and cast–which includes Saffron Burrows, Salma Hayek, Holly Hunter, Kyle MacLachlan, Stellan Skarsgard and Jeanne Tripplehorn as characters immersed in the duplicitous L.A. film scene–and developed a strategy in which they essentially would make a complete movie over and over.
“We tended to shoot at about 11 o’clock, which means you’d wrap at like 12:33, go and have some lunch, make safety copies, and then I set up a kind of screening, which was in fact four playback machines all linked together and four monitors,” Figgis said. “I used to do live mixes of the film for the actors and all the technicians, so you’d see the movie that same day. I would never have anticipated how energized that would make all the actors, but it’s fantastic because you have closure each day.”
Repeating the process was essential, given that the movie required the coordination not only of four cameras in constant motion but also 25 actors who were improvising their lines. Figgis, a jazz trumpet player who scored “Time Code” and previous films, treated the script like a musical score, even printing it, sans dialogue, on notation paper.
The actors were expected to hit certain notes at certain times but could solo in between. The cast and crew members were given synchronized digital watches so they could react to an earthquake at exactly 11:37 or so a camera would be in the right place to capture the arrival of a limousine.
Coordinating the film’s multiple earthquakes required separate rehearsals for the camera operators, who were required to shake their cameras for a uniform duration and intensity, and the performers, who had to pretend they were all experiencing the same Richter scale.
“That was about the only situation in the film where the camera and the actors both had to fake something. Everything else is completely naturalistic,” Figgis said.
The performances also were refined over time, so important dialogue wouldn’t overlap but pleasing juxtapositions–such as one lesbian couple fighting while at the same time a lesbian seduction is underway–would be preserved.
“One of the most valuable things I learned when I was in theater was that it’s the things that crop up that you don’t anticipate that are usually the most interesting,” Figgis said. “Once you start to see the patterns that you’re creating in the quadrant, everybody starts to make aesthetic adjustments. Each day you could see aesthetically the thing was starting to jell more and more.”
In the end, “Time Code” was shot 15 times over two weeks, with the final Nov. 19 version tapped for release. Figgis didn’t stop because he thought the movie was perfect, however.
“I did it till they pulled the plug on the finance,” he said. “I would have happily done it for another week.I felt right up to the last two days that we hadn’t hit the level that I thought we ought to hit. So it put a lot of adrenaline into the last two days because everybody was going for something.”
The final budget, he said, was $3.5 million, less than a 10th the average cost of a Hollywood film. Sony underwrote it and is releasing it under its Screen Gems banner.
“Time Code” is Figgis’ third release within a year, and he appreciates being able to make movies so fast. But to him the advantages of digital video go beyond the efficiency into areas of artistry.
“I think this technology really suits the idea of a looser aesthetic and a less tied-up kind of plan,” he said. “[`Armageddon’ director] Michael Bay is making `Pearl Harbor’–the quote was $150 million.You could never say, `Well, I’m going to improvise a whole section of a $150 million movie.’ You’d be assassinated. Whereas this technology is by definition cheaper therefore it will encourage more experimentation.”
Also, he added, the look of digital video has its own distinct qualities.
“You wouldn’t really want to do a very complex black-and-white still life of a flower using a little Instamatic because you’d probably just be disappointed in what it gave you,” Figgis said. “But something else at a party, where you’re getting quick shots of people and the speed gives you a sort of naturalism, then that’s definitely the better camera than the [high-end] Hasselblad. And I feel the same with the digital stuff. I have no problem aesthetically with the image.”
Plus, the lower costs can liberate a filmmaker from the politics and pressure involved in a studio film. Figgis said the previous day he pulled out of a high-profile project because the studio was insisting on a complete line-by-line script.
“With no sense of regret, I was able to walk away from a deal like that, to say in all honesty, `I don’t think this is going to work for me. This is just not the way I want to work right now,’ knowing that I’m saying goodbye to a really big paycheck if I would play ball,” he said. Figgis is more interested in exploring the new digital frontier. On the eventual “Time Code” DVD, which Figgis said will include the final version plus the chaotic first run-through, viewers will be able to mix their own sound so they can skew the focus to whichever quadrants most interest them.
New media lies in the filmmaker’s future as well.
“I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind specifically going and making, say, 10 short films just for the Net and sort of shooting them and downloading them as I go, with some kind of theme that might run through–but also the idea that you haven’t written all of them,” he said. “You write as you go, and then that creates its own dynamic.”
To Figgis, the digital revolution is a pendulum swinging in his direction.
“It’s like putting it back into the area of the performance as opposed to the technicians–into the hands of the artists rather than the artisans,” he said. “I kind of make an analogy with this with music: Particularly in America the advent of jazz and improvised music created an alternative musical culture, which doesn’t replace the other culture. It’s just a kind of addition, . . . and then it kind of infects the other culture in a way and revitalizes it, and I think that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
“I felt for a long time that the artistic role in filmmaking has been very, very played down almost like a bad word. And I think it’s a good word.”
