“There’s some kind of a release of energy and a purge of soul.” He hopes that if he offers something never seen before and impossible to replicate at home, a chain reaction will occur: audiences will return to the theaters, theaters will invest in digital 3-D screening technology, studios will finance projects, and top filmmakers will jump back into the medium. “I think sitting in a temple shape with a ceremony will always be important,” he says. He remains adamant that theatrical releases are a vital form of communal catharsis, even as filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderbergh have decamped for Netflix. Lee is aware he’s pulling the cart before the horse, but he sees no other way forward. “You can feel the gut feeling of somebody’s temperature. His forehead is dewy, and his bottom lip quivers. One scene of which he’s particularly proud shows the protagonist’s young clone (acted by Smith and generated through digital effects) breaking down emotionally when he discovers a life-changing secret. While the action sequences are formidable, Lee says the medium’s biggest advantage is in the study of faces. “There’s a different intensity of somebody invading you,” Lee says of the viewer experience. In a combat scene that rivals Crouching Tiger in its elaborate choreography, the punches thrown are not just flurries of fists but weighty individual blows. In a chase scene through the streets of Cartagena, Colombia, you see not just a blur of motorcycles but the brushstrokes of colorful street art and the individual feathers on pigeons taking flight. The film is filled with this type of vivid detail. “In 3-D, your brain wants to believe things are actually in front of you because they have shape and movement.” “In 2-D, a movie is a picture on a wall: it’s not something that’s actually real,” he says. But his pursuit is worth it to him because of 3-D’s inherent neurological advantages. “Eighty percent of the time, you’re not dealing with art but obstacles. “We used 2-D concepts.” In order to fully make the leap into the future, new techniques–from lighting to camera angles to makeup applications–would have to be developed.įor Gemini Man, Lee mobilized hundreds of visual-effects artists, developing higher frame rates, clearer CGI graphics and more precise projector technologies. “We imitated film,” Lee says of projects like these. Many recent 3-D releases, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Avengers: Age of Ultron, weren’t filmed with 3-D in mind but were converted in postproduction. Rather than concede, Lee became convinced the problem wasn’t the medium but the approach. Lee’s ambitious and highly anticipated 3-D drama Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which failed to break even at the box office in 2016, looked like it could be the form’s last stand. Box-office returns dropped steadily throughout the decade, hitting a low point last year, as studios stopped greenlighting projects and theaters quit investing in 3-D digital screens. After James Cameron’s 3-D epic Avatar was released in 2009, grossing nearly $2.8 billion at the box office, the form experienced a renaissance: films like Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Lee’s own Oscar-winning Life of Pi–which was praised for its stunning aquatic visuals and glowering digitally created tiger–all achieved success within the next four years, suggesting that a new era of filmmaking had arrived.īut 3-D’s triumphant arrival was soon beset by a harsh backlash from consumers, who bristled at putting on bulky glasses and shelling out extra cash. While Lee raced between genres, styles and obsessions early in his career, his current decade has been one of single-minded intent: to advance 3-D filmmaking. He also believes that the shared movie-theater experience still possesses an unmatched power–and that in the Peak TV era, 3-D might be a key way to lure audiences out of their living rooms. So why would one of film’s leading auteurs devote his career to what most view as a technological trifle? Lee claims that 3-D is a fundamentally different art form from 2-D–that when the brain perceives a realistic third dimension, it prompts a heightened sense of immersion and deeper emotional connection. But Lee hopes it will be a Trojan horse for a mind-set shift around the divisive medium. 11, is in many ways a standard action sci-fi flick–Will Smith plays an aging hit man fighting a younger cloned version of himself. The visual effect is one of extreme fluidity, more like a video game than a traditional feature film. In fact, he’s doubling down: his latest effort, Gemini Man, was shot in 3-D and at 120 frames per second, a far higher rate than the usual 24 frames per second. But Lee, long an iconoclast, still believes in 3-D.
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