Mathieson is thinking along the same lines as Rachel Morrison, who shot the period biopic Seberg: “In a weird way, when you don’t have money, the small expense of film compared to what you can’t afford, like picture cars and extras, is a very simple solution. This is a variation on a common motif I’ve run into while assembling these lists-working on film makes actors and crew more focused-but arguing that film can actually be more cost-effective than digital in general ups the ante. There’s the pricing argument about film versus digital blown straight out of the water.”
One concerns cost-effectiveness: DP John Mathieson explained to the producers “that when shooting film on set there’s a particular discipline-you roll sound, roll camera, come up to speed and if something goes wrong you cut-unlike in digital where there’s a tendency to just keep the camera rolling and to do takes again and again this results in significant overtime costs for the crew over the course of a production, not to mention the hidden dollar costs spent on transcoding, quality control and back-ups. The official tally of films shot, in whole or part, on 35mm for calendar year 2019 is 27, the total shot solely on 35mm is 18 Pikachu intersects with a number of common refrains. Irony poisoning aside, that turns out to be a surprisingly productive place to begin.
Since I’ve already compiled a shot-on-35mm dossier for each previous year’s US theatrical releases five times, it’s not super-surprising that as soon as the internet learned Detective Pikachu was shot on 35mm, a number of people eagerly tweeted at me to let me know/make sure it wasn’t missed in this year’s edition.