SIM2 Multimedia and SIM2 USA Inc. celebrated the launch of its worldwide ad campaign starring the five-time Academy Award-winning film director Francis Ford Coppola, during media event last week in Napa Valley, California. Here are some excerpts of Coppola’s comments during the event:
On his love of technology…
“I always had this love of technology — in electronics — but I was bad at math so I didn’t become the nuclear physicist I wanted to be. At any rate, I became a film director, but always had this boy scientist part of myself.”
Francis Ford Coppola and SIM2 Multimedia president Maurizio Cini
On his early digital cinema prediction…
“Early on in my career, myself and my colleagues decided that the cinema would ultimately be electronic, digital electronics, and we were working in that direction. Before Apocalypse Now, some 30 years ago. I edited Apocalypse Now, much of it, on a very primitive electronic editing system that we built ourselves. And I knew after making that film that could the cinema become electronic that it would be like unleashing a magic genie.”
On the early limitations of video…
“We knew that if ever the picture could achieve the ability that the sound had [with multiple tracks] then much of the magic that was now available to the soundtracks could be availed to the picture. The limitation was was that the picture did not have the beauty, the luster, or the sophistication of photographic film…This is the missing link. How could you take advantage of all of that would be possible with digital electronics and again paralleled with what was already possible with sound and yet still result in an image? The missing link was this beautiful electronic image.”
On being introduced to the TI DLP chip…
“I don’t know when it was, maybe six or seven years ago some people came by. By then I was known for being interested in this stuff. And some people came from Texas Instruments, and they had developed a chip, and they gave me one, it was about this big, and it’s made of a million little teeny, I guess, mirrors…it’s about the size of a 35mm frame with all of these little planes of light that can be controlled by electronics signals and allow bright, bright light, because in earlier video projectors the rays that made the picture on the screen had to be generated by the actual source of light, whereas in a movie projector they have this powerful light that goes through the piece of film, so it’s a very bright, vivid image. And this little Texas Instruments chip that they showed me, essentially would allow you to put a beam of light as bright as a movie projector and create the picture. And that little chip was at the basis of this revolution, which we even see in this fantastic SIM2 projector.”
On his desire to have a SIM2 projector…
“I wanted one of these projectors because we were working and of course we were editing electronically and if we had one of these projectors, we could see the film on that level [of the digital cinema]. Of course those projectors [from NEC, Barco, and Christie] are well over $100,000. I also learned that [TI] licensed a number of companies to make projectors with that chip for the home theater market and some of those projectors at the highest level almost equal, maybe not big auditoriums, but almost equal. I did a lot of research and what I want to say about today is that SIM2 is a wonderful company from Northern Italian… I had gone to Pordenone and I had introduced myself to them and told them that I had researched all of these units and this is the one I wanted, and being Italians, we had this wonderful lunch, so they made this possible. Anything I’ve said about the projector, I say it not because I was contacted by the company to say some good things, but I did it because I really felt it and believed in it and I talk to on that level.”
On his opinion of digital cinema now…
“A release print in a movie theater is jiggling all over the place, it’s scratchy and it has flaws, whereas the new level of digital projection is breathtaking and it’s only going to get better.”
On why some young directors may still prefer film…
“At my age I’m happy…to work in digital cinema because that’s all I wanted; there are many advantages. But the younger people like my daughter Sofia and my granddaughter interestingly, she’s 22, they all have video cameras, but they think film is the cinema. The young people…want to have something to do with film, because they know they are going to lose it in the next 10 years, and I’m very touched by it.
On his opinion of 3D…
“Often in Avatar, which is a magnificent production, I took the glasses off and watched it out of focus for a while…For me to watch a whole movie in 3D is tiresome. Much of it I don’t get a lot of why it is better in 3D. I’ve always been interested in working in 3D, but as long as there are still glasses, I’d rather make the movie in a non-3D regular format and then in a sequence like the big finale, you put your glasses on.”
On shooting movies in HD video…
“Films like Star Wars have good reason to want to shoot in HD because when you do all those effects you’ve got to take all the film and convert it to digital imagery, because all the effects are done digitally. Then you’ve got to convert it back to film. Even today, most of the movies you see that are supposedly shot on film are converted to digital so they can do the effects, and then at great cost it’s converted back.”
