A Filmmaker's Odyssey

By Skip Ferderber

"Digital saved my ass," recalls director Christopher Coppola. It happened during production of his 1999 film Palmer's Pickup: An American Road Show Odyssey, starring Robert Carradine and Rosanna Arquette.

"It was a painful production," Coppola sighs. "I was constantly fighting with the financiers. And when I got back from shooting, the editor left right in the middle of negative-cutting and the editors I brought in spilled glue all over the negative. But I knew hi def was coming, and I thought if I could convert the footage to hi-def and remove all the glue marks, then I could still make the film. I saw the digital evolution happening, and I thought if I got in there I could be helpful to myself and other filmmakers."

And that's exactly what he did. His shot his next film, Bel-Air, the following year with a Canon XL-1 Mini-DV camera; its cast includes Charles Fleischer and Barbara Bain.

"I found out that with digital, you can make it so much of a better performance," he explains. "The camera discovers if you're cheating as an actor. Film allows an actor to hide a bit behind film; a digital camera doesn't have the same softening effect of film. You almost have to be a better actor because digital reveals everything.

"Digital is its own thing, a whole new way of looking at things," Coppola continues. "As a filmmaker, you can do something unique with the cold, hard look. Filmmakers are snooty about the film look, but the kids are growing up with the hyper-real look of video. It's what's normal for them. They relate to it. You might as well start experimenting with it."

Enter Bloodhead

Coppola moved to shooting HD on his next picture, The Curse of Bloodhead (2002), an action feature with Lynda Carter, Bernie Copell, Shirley Jones, and Frank Gorshin. He used both the Panavision version of the Sony HDW-F900 24p CineAlta HDCAM (with Panavision's Primo lenses) and-for slow-motion shots-Panasonic's variable-frame-rate AJ-HDC27 VariCam. Despite a few challenges using what was-at the time-very new equipment, Coppola liked the results.

"I looked at the dailies coming back, and I grew into it," he states. "I loved that you can keep shooting-it's continuous, and not as expensive as film. And I loved the color! I even shot sequences that I wanted to have more of a black-and-white effect, then transform into color. I talked with a film lab; you simply could not have done the same with film. You had so much more control.

"Some directors like the restriction of single-camera film shooting; I like the digital shooting because I can capture spontaneous moments. I like to let the camera roll-and just keep going-and I know it's not costing me an arm and a leg as it would for film. I also like to see exactly what I'm shooting on the monitor. With film you have to wait until the dailies come back. That's a nice freedom to have."

Digital Future

For Bloodhead's post and effects Coppola purchased the newest generation of Macintosh G4/Final Cut Pro 4-based desktop tools and set up his team in a garage behind his Los Angeles house. The cost of the gear and doing the work themselves was roughly equivalent to farming it out to post houses. "We broke even," notes post-production supervisor Michael Cioni wryly.

This decision has since led to the establishment of PlasterCITY Digital Post. Its mission is to pioneer the new-generation of nonlinear post facilities built around off-the-shelf hardware and software, and to help emerging filmmakers. The company recently moved into new headquarters in Hollywood, and includes five edit suites, two for uncompressed SD and HD, the others for graphics and offline. Partly as a result, Coppola has become a sought-after speaker on digital HD and indy filmmaking. He founded PlasterCITY (www.plastercity.com) with his partners as a physical embodiment of the digital filmmaking oeuvre.

"Films were edited on a flatbed; now they're edited on a computer," Coppola observes. "Scripts were written on typewriters; now they're written on computers. And what's in the future? Filmmaking from start to finish on computers? You think not? Look what happened to the silent film: 'Sound will never replace silent...' What scares me is the idea that you can sit in a room and tell [all-digital] 'actors' what to do and the 'actors' will do it."

But Coppola is not at all concerned about the transition from recording movies on film to recording them on tape.

"You're still making films, and stories are the heart of film," he says. "If you can shoot it on film, you can do the same with digital."

As he looks at his current crop of projects, as well as his pioneering work in this new medium, he is reminded of another Coppola who, 20 years ago, pioneered the use of electronic cinema tools to bring the medium into a new generation of technology. His uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, pointed the way to today's digital revolution with his groundbreaking feature film, One From the Heart.

"I'm extremely proud of the things he tried before they became popular," Coppola says. "I think I'm trying in my own small way to carry that mantle."