Quentin Tarantino hates digital film so much that he might stop making movies if the format prevails. The cult director opened his Comic Con panel for upcoming film The Hateful Eight with a long video tutorial about the old-school 70mm film format that the Western was shot in, and will premiere in early next year.
“I’m not a fan of digital projection,” Tarantino said, adding dramatically — and in true Western style, “We’ve ceded too much ground to the barbarians”. The Hateful Eight was shot in the super-wide Panavision format on lenses borrowed from Ben-Hur, as Tarantino believes that, if you shoot and project ‘film’ in a digital format, you might as well be watching “HBO in public”. This analogy led to the director to warn that, if the trend for digital continues, “Maybe I should just move to TV.”
Tarantino on TV doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all actually, and the director even suggested his ten-movies-then-retirement plan could mutate into ten-movies-and-3-mini-series, saying “If I can’t shoot on film, we’ll see what happens. My scripts get cut down anyway. If I wrote a script and it’s eight hours, then we’ll be all good.”
Asked about the Kill Bill franchise, Tarantino kept fans hopes for a third instalment alive, saying “Never say never when it comes to Kill Bill 3,” and teasing that, “Uma (Thurman, ‘The Bride’) would like to do it.”
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Photography via Wikimedia