Shooting Digital, Reluctantly
Two-time Oscar nominee John Mathieson BSC (Gladiator, The Phantom of the Opera, Robin Hood, 47 Ronin) recently completed work on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., an update of the stylish 1960s television series of the same name. Mathieson says that he would have preferred to shoot film, but that the demise of some of the major film laboratories in the U.K. made it impossible. He did shoot a little bit of 16mm film on a wind-up Bolex (processed at Bucks Laboratories) for the opening of the film, to bridge some archival footage from the period with the main storyline. In some ways, the colors and textures of the period production design lent themselves to digital, he says.
