- The Observer,
- Sunday August 26, 2001
Hollywood director George Lucas had hoped to premiere this technology in the latest instalment of his epic series of Star Wars films, but film fans will feel the force of the French movie first.
With an all-star French cast, including Depardieu, Guillaume Canet and Inès Sastre, and a 150 million franc budget (about £15m), Vidocq is expected to become the box-office hit of the Parisian autumn.
Industry watchers believe that high-definition cameras will be a major step in the digital revolution of cinema. Vidocq is likely to sound the death knell of film photography, which is increasingly derided by film-makers. 'We are in the digital age now and trying to hold on to an old-fashioned technology that's cumbersome and expensive - you just can't do it,' said Lucas.
According to Lucas, the digital cameras used for the Star Wars shoot produced images much more cheaply than on film. 'This is not just a little thing. I have the feeling that the conversion to digital is going to take place relatively swiftly.'
By means of high-definition digital technology, film images can be produced that have a remarkable clarity and - even more importantly - give directors greater power to change images on computers. On Vidocq , 800 of the film's 2,300 scenes were manipulated after filming.
'You work on the images you've filmed like a painter on a canvas,' said Vidocq' s director, known simply as Pitof. 'For instance, our photographers took thousand of pictures of skies. Then, using this database, I repainted them to create the looming threatening skies that suit the fantastical atmosphere I want in the film.
'To film this way is more than just a technological challenge - it's an artistic choice. HD [high-definition digital cameras] allows me to get an incredible depth of field, to make the background clearer than before, and to play with what we have filmed to make the images richer and more beautiful. I was trying to make a film that looked rather like the paintings of Gustave Moreau [the French symbolist painter].
'I think this is the first step towards the cinema of the future. It certainly makes it a very different thing to do to make a film - post-production, by which I mean editing and inserting special effects, becomes just as important as the actual filming.'
Pitof is one of a clutch of French film-makers whose special effects skills have turned the heads of Hollywood moguls. He worked with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children , and then on Jeunet's Hollywood picture Alien: Resurrection . He has also worked on the special effects of films such as Luc Besson's biopic Joan of Arc and the French smash Asterix and Obelix Versus Caesar .
On Vidocq , Pitof used the same camera technology George Lucas has been developing with Sony and Panasonic for his latest picture Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones , and it was expected that the film would be the first to showcase the new look.
Lucas has been a great champion of digital cameras in cinema, chiefly because they make it easier to produce sophisticated special effects after filming.
By his own admission, though, Lucas made a great mistake with his previous film, Star Wars - Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, in using ordinary film. Footage had to be scanned into computers for special effects work, then printed back on to film to show in cinemas.
His latest Star Wars film has been made entirely using high-definition digital cameras. It took three months to film but is spending 18 months in post-production for release in spring 2002.
Vidocq is released on 19 September in France. Several films have been made to tell the story of this nineteenth century private eye before. In this version,Vidocq confronts an evil being called the Alchemist who has a mirror for a face. In the opening scene Vidocq is killed and the story taken up by a young journalist who wants to find out what happened to him.
'The film is like Seven [the Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman crime thriller] but set in the nineteenth century,' said Pitof.
The only problem for both Vidocq and Lucas's films is that most cinemas do not yet have digital technology to screen them in the way they were intended. As a result, they will have to be scanned on to 35mm film, which will mean some of the advances will not be noticeable.
