What about increased grain, the most common detriment that critics of Super 35 bring up?
Cameron: Do audiences care more about grain or focus? Where are you more likely to be out of focus, when your wide lens is a 25mm or when it's a 50mm? Focal length is focal length, and depth of field is a result of focal length. If your medium-wide lens is a 50mm, you're going to be out of focus more often, and your Z-axis is going to be a very shallow plane. Some cinematographers like shallow focus, and if that's the case, then anamorphic is not a detriment to them. It would have been very problematic on Titanic, though, since we were going for a very deep-focus style, as we had done on True Lies.
In Super 35, you're able to shoot with shorter focal lengths, you're using spherical lenses, you don't have the strange anamorphic aberrations while shooting, and you're able to get a beautiful anamorphic print at the final print stage. That all speaks in favor of the format. But even if all of those factors combined were a wash, there is still one compelling reason to shoot in Super 35. If you use anamorphic, you cannot do any vertical repositioning whatsoever, so when you go to video you're throwing away half of your beautiful movie. About 99 percent of the video audience will see the film pan-and-scanned. Which half of the picture the left or the right don't you want the audience to see?
As for other proponents of the format, John Alcott started it, and he wasn't exactly chopped liver. Plus, he started using Super 35 when the stocks were not in his favor and the methodology had not been worked out.
This will be your first film to feature a Panavision logo in the end credits. How did you come to use their equipment on Titanic?
Cameron: We didn't obviously shoot in Panavision, but they did supply us with equipment and they did built our special cameras [for the deep-water dives], with the help of my brother Mike. I have to say that dealing with them was a great experience. Their technical support was incredible. As you know, we wound down my old company, Lightstorm Technologies, and Mike and I entered an agreement with Panavision to co-develop technology. We're going into production soon on a couple things we've designed, including the Vid Stick. So we're in a close relationship with Panavision.
They built a new two-perf 35mm camera for the deep-dives, and a housing that could withstand 6,500 psi. The front glass on the housing had 1.2 million pounds of pressure on it. It was three inches thick and made of special-grind borosilicate glass. The optics between this and the 14.5mm Panavision prime that went behind it were very exacting, and had to be worked out on a computer.
The Panavision FTZSAC camera-control had to be modified so it could be interfaced with the sub electronics to run into the housing and operate the run, frame rate, the iris and the focus.
I also told Mike that I wanted the camera movement to operate with wheels, rather than some joystick control. I wanted smooth, movie-type moves, not joystick scientific movements. To do that, Panavision essentially built a hothead that would function 2 1/2 miles under water. It was a big servo-actuated monster that could take this 190-pound camera and housing and move it.
When you're engineering this kind of equipment, it all has to undergo a separate engineering review by at least two other companies, because it's going to be mounted on a manned submersible. The implodable volume of the camera and housing was great enough that if it failed, the shock-wave could sympathetically fail the manned sphere of the sub. If that happened, anyone inside would die in about two microseconds. That means your camera and housing engineering is directly related to your life expectancy. It was unbelievably complex.
Another thing Mike and Panavision came up with was adapting a waveform monitor for exposure control. Basically, the waveform monitor shows you where your peaks and black pedestal are. I've sat in enough telecine bays to know that I could look at the video tap picture from our camera and relate that image to how it would look on film. So I would look at the monitor and crank my midscale values to a set threshold that Mike had drawn on the picture tube with a grease pencil. That information would then determine our f-stop, and we basically had great dailies. It's no use reading with a spot meter through a nine-inch thick viewport on a moving sub by the time you get your reading, the shot will be gone. You'll just drift away. We did all of the readings on the fly with our waveform monitor, and it has occurred to me that this setup could be a powerful tool on the set for certain kinds of shooting circumstances. If you can stick an incident meter in front of an actor's face, by all means do that. But if you're dealing with complex moving subjects from a car or helicopter, and you can't get your spot readings fast enough, the waveform monitor could be a valuable tool. I think cinematographers should consider it.
My brother Mike's engineering skills and Panavision's optical engineering and manufacturing skills made this all work the first time out with just two or three months of development. That's a pretty amazing feat.
Did the shooting approach used on the Imax film Titanica [see AC Jan. 1995] influence your methods on the 'salvage' portion of your film? Both productions used the same Russian subs and research ship to access the wreck.
Cameron: No, our approach was completely different. In fact, I think it was incredibly ballsy of them to do their film the way they did. They fit the Imax camera into the interior of that sub and used an existing viewing port, which was basically the extent of their engineering. The big advance on that film was the HMI lighting system they brought down. The Russian subs have a tremendous power envelope, about two to three times the battery capacity that American, French or Japanese subs can deliver. We could take these 1200-watt HMIs down there and burn them for hours. They were very focused beams, and the blue frequency light they create goes through water very well.
Will Titanic be released in 70mm? Could you outline your experiences with the format?
Cameron: We're negotiating with Paramount on that point right now. Their appetite for 70mm is zero. I think we should go for 70mm prints in 20 to 25 key cities in theaters that deserve it because they kept their equipment in good repair. And we should do it simply because the 70mm prints will look the best. Blowing up to 70mm from a flat negative has been a strange evolutionary process for me. On Aliens, the [70mm prints] didn't look quite as good as the 35mm prints, but the sound was much better. On The Abyss it was a wash: the 70mm prints were slightly less snappy, although the grain was finer. On T2 is was an exact wash on picture quality, but the sound quality was fantastic. But in the case of True Lies, the 70mm really edged ahead. The 70mm prints are made from the same IN as the 35mm anamorphic prints, but since they don't have that lateral smearing, I think they look pin-sharp. Our first tests on Titanic have been dramatic, and I credit it all to the improvements that have been made in the intermediate stocks. The irony, of course, is that just when 70mm prints should be embraced as a great thing, they're being phased out because the new digital sound formats have made the format obsolete from a sound-quality perspective. On certain films, though—and Titanic is one of them—70mm prints should be struck. But I also feel that the 35mm prints will look absolutely beautiful.
