Film processing is much more expensive than digital so studios do not like to use them. When a director makes it in hollywood (i.e. has a hit film), they like to think that they have more power than the studio and demand to have their next movie to be shot on film. It is a status thing. "Nolan got to shoot his movie on film, I want mine the same way." This is the only underlying current these days behind shooting on film. The battle against it has been fought and won on technical and economic matters.
For consumers, this can be a terrible thing. Because to save money in post production, the film is scanned and transferred at 2K and shipped that way to theaters. Then comes the time to do a 4K version and you have to go back and not only re-scan the movie, but also repeat all the editing and color timing (correction). Worse yet you have to get the approval of talent to release it that way. This is why so many movies can't come out in 4K even though they could.
Actually, often, it’s a latitude and dynamic range thing.
Studio executives make decisions based on numbers (1), directors and DOP make decisions based on aesthetics. Producers try to balance the numbers with the elements of physical production relative to the vision of the director.
If you’ve ever been on a shoot (have you?), you’d be aware that not all projects are the same, and not all come with the same requirements. The reasons a director/DOP may choose to shoot on film will always involve consideration of the variables not limited to: The shooting budget, the number of shooting days, the shooting ratio (the number of takes versus what ends up in the cut), the shooting rhythm and length of takes, the number of VFX shots, the ability to control light for exteriors and interiors, and the post-production budget (on an indie/low-medium budget film i.e. under $15 million, the first budget to be cut is always the post-production budget, meaning if you hoped your horrible flat ungraded digital footage could be made to look “cinematic” by spending days and weeks at a post-production house because digital always allows you to “fix it in post”, you might be in for a shock). Aside from aesthetics, some directors/DOP prefer to shoot film because they do so in conditions in which digital becomes more problematic, say, where temperature extremes or remote locations are involved.
Although film stock is a cost that must be factored into the shooting budget, digital in-and-of-itself is not superior in terms of a shooting format relative to budget. If you shoot digital, do you send out each day for the dailies to be graded? Are you shooting 4K Cine or 6K or 8k? Are you a Fincher who likes to average 50 takes per scene? Are you a Jackson or Cameron who like to shoot in 3D at 4K generating millions and million of bits of data that needs to be workflowed via a village of digital imaging technicians and data wranglers responsible for data management, data integrity, data backup, and on-set colour correction? Are you shooting
The Hobbit and generating 398 billion bits of data for each second of the film and therefore need a 24/7 team of colour graders working off-site just to correct the ungraded dailies (2)?
If you are, can your budget accommodate the greater number of people on set who all need to be transported, fed, and paid, not to mention those off-site in a lab or edit suite making your raw footage into something that looks palatable?
Perhaps the words of these two cinematographers speak most to the realities of film-making in a way that probably best sums up how decisions are made that, contrary to your opinion, have nothing to do with status:
"I found that film and film cameras are more robust and able to deal with the vagaries of temperature and conditions. Again, when you came to the DI [digital intermediate], we have grain, we have contrast, but yet when we want to open up the negative and create a paler side, the latitude is there for the earlier scenes in her house." Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC (
Atonement, Anna Karenina, The Avengers, Nocturnal Animals)
"We agreed immediately we wanted to shoot on film. We actually shot all the night scenes digitally to capture them in candlelight or the dusk scenes with torches. It was the best of both worlds. We used film for what it’s best at—skin tone and nuance on faces and color of the landscape—then digital for low-light situations." Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC (
Silence, The Wolf of Wall Street, Argo, Brokeback Mountain)
With more from the directors and cinematographers and the twenty-nine films shot on 35mm in 2016 see here:
http://filmmakermagazine.com/101600-27-movies-shot-on-35mm-released-in-2016/#.WRwN1TOQ3dQ; the sixty-four films shot on 35mm in 2015 see here:
http://filmmakermagazine.com/97320-64-films-released-in-2015-shot-on-35mm/#.WRwD6TOQ3dQ; and the thirty-nine films shot on 35mm in 2014 see here:
http://filmmakermagazine.com/88971-39-movies-released-in-2014-shot-on-35mm/#.Vo5U9s4qFss
853guy
(1) Producer Daniel Hank, a former AMC network executive who had a hand in countless film, commercial and television productions that have been shot on film, including
Breaking Bad and
Walking Dead (why? “because HD gives away the makeup details too much”), (says): “We did one show for a director who had to shoot film and it cost $30,000-40,000 more per $3 million episode,
or about one to 1.33 percent more.” (Bolding mine)
https://www.moviemaker.com/archives...-expense-of-shooting-on-film-a-misconception/
(2)
http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...digital-debate&p=367646&viewfull=1#post367646