What was the first Hollywood movie shot on digital?
In 2002, a gathering of the most acclaimed, influential, and downright iconic directors in Hollywood history piled into the screening room of one of their most successful colleagues. He had assembled them to show off scenes from his new movie – the first Hollywood film ever shot on digital cameras instead of celluloid. Luminaries like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Robert Rodriguez, Michael Bay, Robert Zemeckis, and Roland Emmerich watched on as their contemporaries Michael Mann and Francis Ford Coppola also screened examples of their experiments with digital.
However, as more footage of this newfangled way of shooting movies was shown, one of the directors challenged the march of technology. Stone reportedly grumbled, “Film is what we do. It’s what we use. You’ll be known as the man who killed cinema.” He wasn’t quite ready to abandon the old-fashioned ways of shooting movies on film reels, and in later years, other directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino also took that stance.
However, Stone was powerless to stop George Lucas from showing off what he’d shot for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. It was the very first Hollywood picture shot entirely on a high-definition digital 24-frame camera, and the movie business was teetering on the edge of a revolution. Amazingly, though, at the time, only a select few cinemas even had the technology capable of screening a digital movie, so it was mostly shown to the public in the traditional format.
To his credit, Lucas was ahead of his time on this particular technological advancement, and he actually convinced camera companies to join him on an adventure with no guaranteed pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
In 2002, he told American Cinematographer, “We had to talk Sony into it. They built the cameras, and they tried really hard to make this work; we also had to talk Panavision into committing a lot of money to build those lenses. Both companies really went out on a limb. This was a giant experiment for everybody, and nobody knew if it was going to work or if they were pouring money down a rat hole.”
What movie beat it to the screen?
Interestingly, while Lucas can undoubtedly take credit for pioneering digital cinema in Hollywood, Episode II wasn’t the first movie to be released that was shot with digital cameras. That honour goes to the 2001 French film Vidocq, a mystery about Eugène François Vidocq – the famed criminalist and founder of France’s National Police – hunting a supernatural serial killer in Paris in 1830.
To give it its full technological specification, that unique picture was the first feature film to be shot in digital progressive HDTV at 24 frames per second, and it was released a full nine months before Episode II came along. It was directed by Pitof, a former visual effects supervisor who would later make the jump to Hollywood with 2004’s Catwoman. Unfortunately for him, that Halle Berry vehicle was so atrocious that he never directed an American film again.
Ultimately, Lucas and Pitof were the men responsible for the biggest challenge to traditional filmmaking in the last 100 years. While the likes of James Cameron, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh have embraced the possibilities that digital technology affords them, though, many others believe it has robbed cinema of some of the indefinable qualities that make a movie look ‘cinematic’.
As Lucas put it in 2002, though, progress can’t be slowed, no matter how much some people may want it to be. “There is so much misinformation being put out there by people who have interests other than the quality of film,” he argued. “They’re determined to slow this down or stop it, but they can’t. It just won’t happen…This whole field is really going to ramp up in the next ten or 20 years.”
