Colin Trevorrow Will Shoot Star Wars: Episode IX on Film Because It’s “A Period Film”

Colin Trevorrow, director of Star Wars: Episode IX, plans to shoot the entire movie on film — just as he did with Jurassic World. The reasoning he gave on a Sundance Film Festival panel? Probably a joke, but here it is, via Variety:

I could never shoot Star Wars on anything but [film] because it’s a period film: It happened a long time ago … There’s something in my brain that says, “well they didn’t have video cameras then.”

I think Trevorrow might be referring here to the way in which the original films were shot, not to the question of whether or not the Star Wars characters have access to digital video cameras. Still, it’s an interesting question! The Star Wars characters do know how to record people as holograms, but that’s about as far as their storytelling technology seems to go — and the only holograms we’ve seen have been used for military communiques.

The technological development within the universe of Star Wars seems almost uniformly devoted to warfare, not artistic pursuits. There must be filmmaking communities somewhere, even if they’re only making propaganda shorts about the Empire or the First Order or whatever. There’s probably a spin-off comic book about them, and you’re all going to tell me about it in the comments (please?).

Trevorrow also mentioned on the panel that he’d like to use some footage from space in Episode IX: “I asked the question, ‘Is it possible for us to shoot IMAX film plates in actual space for Star Wars, and I haven’t gotten an answer yet, but they’ve shot IMAX in space.” Christopher Nolan, a co-panelist, explained that he had done this while shooting Interstellar and gotten “incredible footage from space” in the process.

You can watch the entire panel via this video, although it’s a bit of a tough watch because the audio isn’t synced up with the video feed at all — just pretend it’s a podcast and ignore the video part.

(via Variety, image via Huffington Post)

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