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first hit me.

I was coming home from a foot

match in Copenhagen and I had

a Sony PC3, which actually

was the camera I ended up

shooting Celebration on.

And I remember seeing this crowd

of, like, supporters just moving

across this field with an

industrial backdrop.

It was misty and hazy, and it

was kind of gothic.

I was just learning how to play

with it, and I just whipped it

around, and then I got this

weird moment of immediacy-

of lightness and immediacy.

And I looked at the image, and

I thought, "My god, the amazing

thing about this camera is,

I caught that.

Two months later, I'm shooting

Celebration on these small

cameras 'cause I wanted to be

a protagonist in the Celebration.

Hi, pa.

The combination of the

movement and the activity and

the emotion- the emotional

movement of that camera would

probably define that film's

visual language, apart from the

actors and the writing and the

great script.

With that camera, I suddenly

saw these moves, these possible

movements that I didn't know in my cinema...

And that became my donation

to the Celebration.

What celebration meant and

what a lot of the other films of

that era meant was that you just

had to completely rethink the

technical side of filmmaking.

It brought people to filmmaking

for creativity's sake.

It pointed out that the

mechanism of filmmaking only

serves the creative.

I'll get it.

You want me to get it?

No, I got it.

With DV came this whole idea of, "Well, wait a second.

If we lower our budgets, we get more freedom as directors and as producers.

Shooting a film on video at that point meant it was crap.

It was almost, you know, an

accepted truth that you didn't

shoot films that you were serious about on any kind of video format.

We just started going out there, and we were saying,

"Look, we're gonna make movies digitally.

We're gonna give directors final cut- total creative control-

but we'll make them cheaper."

And our very first movie was Chuck and Buck.

Hey, Buck.

Oh, hi.

Can I get you something to drink?

Oh, no, that's all right.

Looking at rushes, it was scary as hell.

Would you like some ice cream?

Really?

Oh, mmm.

I like ice cream.

We were, like, "My god, this

looks so amateurish."

A lot of people actually commented on how muddled it looked.

I think we're f***in' doomed, man.

I remember when we were

presenting it at Sundance.

They were scared to death that the reaction would be "this was shot on video."

The digital presentation did not

look nearly, in any way, like an

acceptable substitute for what film was.

Because of, um...

porn and because of documentary

and because of news footage,

video occupies a space

in your mind where you're

kind of like, "I'm here.

I'm in that room with them.

Oh, my god, is this really happening?"

And that makes Chuck and Buck better.

People were starting to think in a completely different way about,

"how could the technology and the medium help us to rethink filmmaking?"

You started to see people

start to challenge the idea-

as did the group known as Indigent.

They were creating standard-def video that would

then be converted to film for

theatrical release.

I think as an independent filmmaker, we are in the most

exciting time ever, because now we can go out and make a film on DV.

Oscar has a new girlfriend.

Really?

Mm-hmm.

It seems last evening, he had

quite the late-night conversation.

the idea was that if you

shoot digitally, it's cheap.

And it absolutely helped fuel the number of films that got made.

I remember, though, my first

year at Sundance, we had 225

submissions total for the

fiction category.

You know, a few years later, it was ten times that.

Back to, like, you know, the

Sundance days or, you know,

the releases of indigent, people

were saying, "Well, that's okay

for you- it's independent-

but this isn't cinema.

This isn't"-

that was a huge thing to make

a film on a video camera and go

to Sundance and win Best Director and win Best Film for Personal Velocity.

Tell us about her.

Gary's own film, Tadpole, ended

up being sold for an enormous

amount of money, and everyone that worked on it made money from that sale.

And that's when a lot of the

idea of, "Wait a second.

You can shoot films digitally,

and it's almost like a

production aesthetic," and that's when all the debate started.

I mean, you must have heard in the late '90s "film is the gold standard."

Yeah.

And the tools that you're

playing with are what?

Debasing, threatening.

I have been slapped around.

If you want to-

What do you mean, "slapped around"?

I-I mean, I've been applauded and almost executed

for the same sentence.

it was quite obvious for me

to go to digital, because of,

you know, the material you could

have in the camera.

The amount of material you could

have in the camera was obvious.

Since I was trying to create

another way of working with

actors, and that was essential.

I imagine there was, like,

a liberation for you, then,

in terms of the relationship

with your actors, longer takes-

as you know, Keanu,

ten minutes was maximum.

It wasn't even really ten.

It was nine-something, you know.

And when that thing starts

rolling, there's a kind of

underlying feeling that it's

precious stuff rolling through

there, and it puts a kind of

a tension on things.

I could shoot as much as

I wanted.

I could get the best performances.

I didn't have to worry about shooting these little bursts of film.

You know, that was ridiculous,

but that's what I had to do.

That's how expensive it was comparatively.

Digital-a little gizmo-

running this camera and talking

to the actor,

starting over again.

Reveal.

And now you go around and

look up.

And they get down in there and

they catch a thing that

never would get caught if you

had that giant thing there.

I love to run the camera,

especially when we're in an

emotional place and magic is

happening.

When you go "cut," then all of

a sudden, everybody gets in

there, and you were at a place

where it was just there, and

then everything stops.

And it's like, "Okay, now go

back to that."

Now it's like, "No, just run

the camera, back to one."

Okay, guys, stand by.

In five.

As fast as you can get back to your position, you can go again.

And I've just always felt there was just way too much waiting,

because movies for me,

there's always that momentum problem,

you know, 'cause I grew up in

the theater, and that's how

I was trained,

And a lot of times in movies,

I feel like, "Can we go?"

It's very tough for me to say

that I need to be able to shoot

a 45-minute take or something

and not reload the cameras,

because the truth is, the entire

crew can only concentrate, the

actors can only concentrate for

so long, and then you need a

two-minute break, a three-minute

break, during which time you reload.

When you're running a film

camera on set, everyone seems to

take things a little bit more

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