Excerpt from Wired Magazine's June 2006 interview with Bryan Singer:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/singer.htmlYou’re one of the last big directors to go digital. Why did you make the switch?I’m an old-fashioned guy, so this was a huge step. I remember going to George Lucas’ digital summit at Skywalker Ranch in 2002. It’s this event to showcase digital technologies, with all these filmmakers: Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Ron Howard, John Lasseter, Bob Zemeckis, Oliver Stone, Robert Rodriguez. It was a hoot. Texas Instruments had a demo of the new digital protection systems. Suddenly I’m sitting with all my idols – I felt like I won some big prize. I had breakfast with Lucas the last morning. He was really making the pitch hard for digital, and I just felt there’s still this artifact, there’s still stuff going on that bothers me.
What changed your mind?We shot the screen test for Brandon Routh, who plays Superman, in Super 35 film. That’s how I shot X2 and The Usual Suspects. And we thought, just for fun, we would throw up an old 70-mm Panavision camera at the same time. That’s how they shot Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s not used anymore because it’s outrageously expensive. We threw the screen test up in a theater that had 70-mm capability, and then we just went back and forth. Suddenly the 35-mm image looked so primitive. It was depressing, in resolution, clarity, and intimacy. The 70-mm was like Imax but without the crazy eight stories. But using 70-mm cameras would be millions of dollars more expensive. Around that time, my cinematographer, Tom Siegel, said, “Well, there’s this new digital camera called the Genesis that uses the Panavision lenses and records the image onto a single chip the same size as the 35-mm film frame.”
They had some prototype cameras just sitting around at the ready?Well, there was one. We brought this one camera to Australia, where we were filming, and started doing tests against the Super 35. We filmed a girl in a golf cart driving around the lot, from midday to sundown, so we could see different light qualities, what the headlights would look like, how the look would change from natural to artificial lighting. We shot surfaces, like wood and stone. We shot everything with both film and the Genesis. And then Tom and I locked ourselves in a screening room at Fox Studios Australia and just watched all of it, digital next to film. We felt that it was exquisite enough and different enough. In that room, the two of us made the decision to do it.
But nobody had used these cameras to shoot a movie yet. How’d you convince the studio to take the gamble?I wrote an email to Jeff [Robinov, president of production at Warner Bros.] and said I wanted to do this. And he said, Cool. So then the next step was Panavision’s gearing up to make enough cameras. By the end, we went through almost a dozen of them and found that a lot of things hadn’t been worked out yet. Our movie became a big testing ground for the technology.
