CONTAGION

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from our colleagues across the Internet — and, occasionally, our own writers. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Steven Soderbergh tells Esquire why he stopped making movies:

The reason is, and I understand it… The fact that it became a story at all is because of Matt Damon. He remembered verbatim a drunk conversation we had in Chicago and repeated it to USA Today. I’d talked about it before and nobody gave a shit. It wasn’t until Matt said that I had a plan to get out. The bottom line when people talk about all the reasons, you know the biggest reason? It stopped being fun. It just stopped being fun. It really wasn’t. That’s a big deal to me. It may sound like “Why do you have to have fun to go to work?” I don’t know. I like to be in a good mood. The ratio of bullshit to the fun part of doing the work was really starting to get out of whack.

At In Contention, Kris Tapley on the digital legacy of Michael Mann‘s Collateral ten years later:

In 2010, Albert Martinez’s “Rosario” became the first film to shoot on the Arri Alexa, still a dominant digital camera today that has been used for films as disparate as “Mr. Popper’s Penguins,” “Drive,” “Hugo,” “Amour” (Haneke adapted) and “Skyfall.” “Hugo,” you’ll recall, won the Oscar after losing the ASC prize to “The Tree of Life,” (nominated alongside Jeff Cronenweth’s work on David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”). Meanwhile, “Skyfall” — shot by the legendary Roger Deakins, a full-on convert after transitioning to digital on 2011’s “In Time” — was the first film photographed 100% digitally to win the ASC award, in 2012.

AMC is spending $600 million to add recliners to movie theaters, WSJ reports.

At The Dissolve, Scott Tobias on what “you’ve got to see what on the big screen” means in 2014:

You’ve got to see that on the big screen.” In the decades before broadcast and videotape came along, this statement was meaningless. There was no other way to see that, other than on the big screen. And even after home viewing took off, no one could argue that the experience was remotely equivalent to seeing a movie in a theater, only that it might be an acceptable compromise. But we’re coming on 20 years since DVD became a viable format, long enough that a generation of young moviegoers—a generation that Hollywood is most heavily courting—doesn’t remember when seeing movies at home was a terrible compromise. And now that widescreen HDTV sets and high-quality streaming and Blu-rays are ascendent, the distinction between couch and theater seat has become, for the average moviegoer, essentially meaningless.

Read Tilda Swinton‘s Reddit AMA:

Working with both Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson is like the summer camp of dreams.. with significant themic differences.. Wes Camp means all staying in a big house together and eating round one big table every night, none of that trailer stuff that big movies do, which tends to divide people out and make for lonely days (so I hear).. Jim Camp is rock n’ roll camp, nocturnal, super mellow, like the endless morning after a crash-out sleep-over when noone really wants to go home..

Little White Lies interviews Annie Atkins, graphic designer on The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Watch Nelson Carvajal‘s video essay on Bong Joon-ho:

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