The future of cinema beckons

Could Casablanca have been made on digital?

By the PM programme's Nigel Wrench

Up in the projection room of the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, north London, they are proud of their pair of Victoria Fives with digital sound.

Daniel Broch, who runs the Everyman, likes to show off these projectors: showing films the way they've been shown since the birth of cinema more than a hundred years ago.

"We've landed on the moon, we can send messages round the world in seconds, there's supersonic travel and yet this one particular medium hasn't changed at all," he says.

Now, while acknowledging a sentimental attachment to the medium which gives films their name - "if you mess with cinema, you mess with people's lives" - he's planning to swap the Victoria Fives for digital projectors, just as soon as they are both available and affordable.

Some cinema goers saw a digital version of Toy Story 2 ©Disney/Pixar

So, what we now call films will be played off hard drives, the digital information transmitted to cinemas by satellite or even telephone lines - encrypted to evade those who would pirate new releases.

For smaller cinemas like the Everyman, it could mean a whole new audience - the same equipment could give the big screen treatment to a live sports event or a global conference.

Mr Broch says, "It is the future."

The phrase is echoed across the industry. The big gainers could be the studios. Each print costs $1,000 - dollars are the currency of the movie industry - to make.

There may be several hundred in any one country on release day. At Screen Digest magazine, senior analyst Patrick von Sychowski has calculated that the savings globally to the industry could be $5bn a year.

Who pays?

The numbers are compelling. The difficulty is over who pays the conversion costs. There are almost 3,000 screens in Britain and less than 10 have digital facilities.

When is the right time to make the leap?

Peter Dobson, Warner vice-president

At the Warner West End, on London's Leicester Square, the spiritual home of the movies in Britain, they have a prototype digital projector, cost £250,000 or so.

Warner vice-president in charge of international sales Peter Dobson says, "When is the right time to make the leap? When is the technology going to be finally set so that it is not going to get any better than that?

"With our digital sound, the ear cannot hear any better than we give it now. We need to do that with picture. When we can, that will be the time to leap."

For a film-maker there is something very important and special about using film

Isaac Julien, independent film-maker

If the numbers are enormous for the studios and the cinemas, there are opportunities for young film-makers, unable to afford the costs of film stock. Basic digital video is cheap: a domestic camera will do at a push.

Paul Brett of the British Film Institute is hoping the big cinema chains will, with their digital equipment, feature small independent films alongside the digital special effects blockbusters which will benefit most from the new technology.

"We think there is a perfect mix," he says of his negotiations.

The doubters

But there are those who doubt that all this progress is necessarily a good thing.

Will audiences warm to digital or lament the passing of celluloid?

I went to see the ferociously independent film-maker Isaac Julien, who now spends much of his time working on art gallery installations.

You might expect that as an often cash-strapped director, he'd welcome digital. Instead he says, "For a film-maker there is something very important and special about using film. Film has a more painterly image.

"Perhaps one feels cheated when one watches a film made and shown using digital technology. Audiences may think that what they're seeing is not really cinema."

And when I asked if Casablanca could have been made on digital, he simply laughed. "That was an icon of the black and white era," is all he would say.

There a mystique and a history associated with film, that the new technology simply cannot match.