Tarantino's unconventional ultra-wide format for Hateful Eight.
Word broke out a while ago that Quentin Tarantino’s
western epic The Hateful Eight would
not only finally begin production but that the iconoclastic director would be
shooting his passion project in the elite 70mm film format. After Paul Thomas Anderson used it recently
for The Master followed by
Christopher Nolan’s use of IMAX 70mm film for Interstellar, it seemed fitting Mr. Tarantino would jump on board
for the use of older film formats as part of his penchant for film
preservation. But then an even bigger
piece of news fell from the sky that is seriously unbelievable that it’s really
happening: Quentin Tarantino will be shooting The Hateful Eight in the extremely rarely used Ultra Panavision 70, a pants-droppingly wide 70mm format which was
extremely short lived and only used for big Hollywood movies from 1957 to 1966. Films like Ben-Hur and a majority of the Cinerama
three-camera process projects such as How
the West Was Won and It’s a Mad, Mad,
Mad, Mad World utilized the extraordinarily rare camera before it was
retired with the Charleton Heston epic, Khartoum. In short, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight represents the first
film shot in Ultra Panavision 70 in
almost 50 years.
To give an idea of what this format is like, let’s
take a look at aspect ratios forming the dimensionality of a screen image. At the dawn of cinema, most films were framed
at what was dubbed the Academy Ratio
of 1.33:1, approximately the size of a standard CRT television unit. When black and white television began pulling
patrons from theaters in the 1950s and the film industry started facing
bankruptcy, a gimmick known as widescreen
was started with the 1953 Biblical epic The
Robe. Shot in CinemaScope 35mm, audiences saw the 20th Century Fox
logo open from 1.33:1 to a panoramic width of 2.55:1, presenting a positively
epic vista that immersed viewers into the film as never before. Soon an armada of competing formats would
follow, 70mm VistaVision at 1.66:1 among them.
Michael Todd, best known for Around
the World in Eighty Days, pioneered both the three-camera widescreen
process known as Cinerama before
selling the project off in an effort to refine the process to one camera which
then became Todd-AO with a ratio of
about 2.20:1. During the short life of Cinerama, two competing widescreen
formats designed specifically for Cinerama
projection were created, Ultra
Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65.
What makes Ultra
Panavision 70 unique to other film formats used around the time of an endless
format war is how unbelievably, incredibly wide the screen image is. Where CinemaScope
was briefly known as THE widescreen format at 2.55:1, Ultra Panavision 70 reached an unattainable width of 2.76:1, making
it the widest widescreen format in the world!
Reportedly, it’s a lot easier to work with than the less-wide Todd AO for being less bulky of a camera
and shooting at 24fps versus 30fps. Both
have an incredible depth of field and are responsible for some truly
breathtaking images, but only one pushed the envelope for how panoramic the
screen can be. With the news out
concerning Tarantino’s resurrection of the dead format, Tarantino will
reportedly invest in retrofitting theaters with 70mm projectors that can handle
the ultra-widescreen format so it can be displayed properly. Where Tarantino perfected the western with
both Kill Bill Vol.2 and the recently
released Django Unchained, now he has
with the use of Ultra Panavision 70 made
a film on the same level as some of the greatest films produced from the late
1950s to the early 60s. This is truly
exciting news for film buffs and Tarantino die-hards, offering something new
that hasn’t been seen in half a century and spoken of the breath of a man who
truly knows and loves the ins and outs of cinema!
-Andrew Kotwicki
