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seriously.

When they hear the film

running-when they hear the

money running through the

camera, basically-everybody

brings their "a" game.

Action.

Then puts it together again,

how it carries you to-

The first time I'd ever heard

the whir of film going through

a camera, it was thrilling.

Also made me very nervous

because all of the sudden,

each take counted in a way that I had never really experienced before.

What about that moment after

you say "action"?

Like, for me, when that camera's

rolling, I guess maybe it's

connected to the money, but the

ten-minute reel is so finite.

It's almost an athletic

thing, like, "focus, focus.

Uh."

You know, like, that's good for

the-

That's just atmosphere, though,

you know?

I mean, if you want that, you

can create that, right?

I thought it would make

a difference to actors.

I don't think it does

particularly to actors.

I think actors just infinitely

adjust to whatever they-

whatever way they have to tell it, they'll tell it.

They didn't ask for a break?

They didn't say, "Hey, can we stop?"

You're on digital now.

Yeah, but my first experience

with that was just, you know,

there was no "cut."

You know, I worked with Richard

Linklater on a film called

a Scanner Darkly...

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was just like-

you could just go on.

Yeah, I was just, like,

"Can we please stop?"

"Stop."

No, we don't have to.

But-but I wanted to.

Camera right or left?

Robert Downey actually came

up to me, and he said,

"I can't work like this.

I never get to go to my trailer.

I never get my sh*t together.

I'm on my feet 14 hours a day.

I'm shooting all the time."

He actually left mason jars of

urine on the set, just, like,

over in the corner and stuff.

Just-he would go off and he would pee, and then he'd bring it back.

And that was his, like,

form of protest.

I'd previously worked on

celluloid only, really, and been

thrilled, you know, to arrive at

the holy grail of celluloid.

It was, like, amazing.

So I made the first few films on

celluloid.

I made a very big hollywood

film, The Beach,

with Leonardo Dicaprio and a big crew, and it

didn't suit me at all.

I felt it was too much away from me, really, somehow.

And so I then saw Celebration.

It wasn't so much the film.

It wasn't even the look.

It was the camera operating,

that movement of the camera.

And so I got in touch with the

guy who shot it, Anthony Dod Mantle,

and I said, "well,

I feel like I'm not doing the

right thing anymore.

Can we do something together digitally?"

Which-I didn't really know

what I was saying by saying that.

It was kind of like a new word,

in a way.

Then we came up with the script,

on consumer cameras.

But I remember Anthony saying to

me, "It's all very well working

in this format, you know," but he said, "I'll never get an Oscar."

There was a sequence in it at

the beginning where the

character, Cillian Murphy,

wanders round a deserted London.

Hello!

And we would not have been

able to achieve the film

on film, because we had to

stop traffic.

We didn't have the money to do

it, so what we would do is, we'd

just hold the traffic briefly,

but because we were on these

cameras, we could use ten of

them 'cause they're so cheap,

and he could walk through

Central London- an area of it-

and we had ten cameras on it.

So you'd only have to stop the

traffic for a few minutes,

and then you would actually have ten shots.

That was an enormous advantage.

well, I placed cameras

around- not coincidentally and

not badly and not loosely.

I try to control every angle,

and I know roughly where it's

best, when it's gonna be used.

But that said, you can let it

run a bit, and because it's

digital, you get something.

If you were in a wide shot

with a small figure in it,

they were just, like, two or three pixels.

I mean, there was nothing there.

There was just the color.

Quality-wise, if you put it up against an exact copy of it on film,

the film would be immeasurably superior,

But you could shoot illegally and surreptitiously without people knowing.

You could do unconventional things.

And the rhythm of film, which

has been passed on since it

began and crews have learned-

you interrupted that.

I loved that freedom, and I got

the taste for it then.

And I knew once we'd shot that sequence, that I was gonna work on it now.

That was what I wanted to work on.

It makes the editor's job

extraordinary 'cause they're

often plowing through masses and

masses and masses of material.

In the 1970s and '80s,

electronics companies began

working on solutions to replace

film editing.

For over 100 years, editing

meant physically cutting and

connecting pieces of film.

When you used to go to an

editing room, they brought in

the trim basket, they took the

film out, they looked at it

through the moviola, and then

you slapped it together like

this-you remember, the white

gloves- and they were incredibly

fast at it.

I'd find the frame, I'd-you know, sometimes splicing to the

point of, you know, getting your

fingertips bloodied, you know,

and that was really the blood in the film.

So, I mean, you really had it,

and now it's, you know,

pressing little buttons.

Now this is the floppy disk

that we're all familiar with.

Early editing systems used

multiple magnetic disks, tape

machines, and laser disks to

store and read digitized film.

Most of these systems were

enormous and very costly.

The first thing that happened, really, that changed

everything, I think, was the

digital editing machine, which

meant our dailies had to be

converted from film into tape.

So that started a whole thing going.

We started a picture editing

system that was all digital.

We had the first Edit Droid

working in 1980,

and eventually, we sold the

system to Avid.

By the late 1980s, Avid had

developed digital editing into

a compact, cost-effective,

computer-based system.

When I first saw the Avid as

a demo, the image quality was

blocky and tiny, and I said,

"this is gonna be really good

when they get the image quality

right in about five years' time.

Why not try it on the Avid?

And, you know, I'm also one of

those early adopter people.

I like to leap into the unknown.

I remember on the English

Patient, I suddenly really

looked at the image and said,

"Oh, no."

"How am I gonna be able to do this?"

When I'd work with older

editors, they'll often talk

about the time when computers

were starting to come in

and say, you know, they were

very resistant to it because

they weren't familiar with computers.

They were just scared that they

didn't know enough about it.

If you pushed this button or if

you accidentally turned it off

wrong or turned it on wrong,

that everything would be gone,

whereas that could never happen

if you actually physically had

the film in your hand.

They thought, "That's not editing.

Editing is..."

So when you're editing a movie

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