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The next time Steven Spielberg makes this gesture -
- I guess he’ll be hard at work on Robopocalypse, an adaptation of Daniel Wilson‘s man vs. machine ‘future-war’ novel, written by Cabin in the Woods and Cloverfield‘s Drew Goddard.
But quite what manner of camera those hands will be standing in for is yet to be determined.
Spielberg has spoken to Yahoo ahead of the IMAX re-release of Raiders of the Lost Ark and talked about his feelings towards the format in general. Could he be interested in making one of his future films on a large gauge film stock?
He said:
I’m going to do an IMAX camera test, [both] a 2 and 3D test for my next movie Robopocalypse, and I haven’t decided whether I’m going to use the IMAX cameras, and I haven’t decided whether it’s going to be 2D or 3D yet, but I am in September going to start doing some tests.
There we go, further consolidating IMAX’s position has a hot brand.
Two Chris Nolan Batfilms, the last Mission: Impossible and the next Star Trek all have sequences filmed in IMAX, but also sequences filmed in a more ‘traditional’, typical-cinema-friendly manner too, either digitally or on 35mm. Could Spielberg be planning to shoot the entirety of his film in the IMAX format? I really wouldn’t put it past him.
And, going by the letter of that quote, there’s even a possibility of him shooting it in native 3D IMAX too – though that would be a technical headache, I’m sure.
Also, do note that he’s saying nothing about higher frame rates, as applied to The Hobbit and the Avatar sequels. I’d be surprised if he’d be into higher frame rates, though – I think Spielberg likes the romance of 24fps artefacts.
Incidentally, Spielberg says that the only one of his pre-existing films he’d still consider for an IMAX conversion would be Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
Forty percent of that film was shot in 70 millimeters, so the conversion would look extraordinary if we ever did put it up on an IMAX screen.
A timely reminder that Spielberg was doing that format-swapping thing back in the 70s, years before Nolan came along.
Raiders of the Lost Ark will be in IMAX cinemas on September 7th, and the Blu-ray Indiana Jones set will be along a little over a week later on the 18th.
