All language subtitles for 20 - Color

I really loved color when I was a child

watching these films

and I found that as the color process changed

the color changed you know

and eventually by the early 50s

the change from three strip to monopack

change the nature of the color

and colors became more muted

I thought I happen to like the very bright colors of

early Technicolor

that doesn't mean I don't like black and white

that's that's the difference

that the black and white was color

and still is

but I was really fascinated by

that projection on the screen

and I think it may have been because

the first film I saw was dueling the sun

was three script Technicolor in that

the credits

the opening credits come up

the blazing hot yellow sun

and the titles come up

and hear gunshots

and it was absolutely

overpowering feeling

watching that film or trying to watch

actually terrified me

I was about 5 years old

but the use of color in that

I think set

set the tone for me

and there's no doubt that I um

I respond to vibrant use of color in that

or the moment

like in 1948

when my brother took me to see

a re release of Wizard of Oz

when the sepia sequences at the beginning

and the house lands and Oz you know

and it's still in sepia

but she opens the door and it's Technicolor

um that moment

I've always been something that I I love

I love when films in the late 40s

were in black and white

and then there was one sequence in color

like The Portrait of Dorian Gray

um or the end of portrait of Jenny where um

it's tinted green

the storm and ultimately

the last shot is in color of the film

this made it very special for me

and then seeing

um uh the uh

two color films uh

which I I felt were magical to me

and so this all revolved around that technical process

that Oswald Mars and John Houston used on Moby Dick

the desaturation of the color

which I tried to do many times

basically coming up with an image that looked um

so desaturated that uh

it was almost like uh the uh

colorized agora type in a way

and had a great

great sense of almost like

uh looking at

uh paintings

or I should say

scrimshaw uh

etchings done on

um whalebone

uh it was quite

quite beautiful I thought

you see when a picture is made in color

you also have to design in color

that means the color means something uh

and uh color is special

you know um

and the use of color was something new in a way

but just to shoot

because it's color doesn't quite make sense

so the use of um

primary colors is important

as I say color means something

even when you don't want it to it does

and so you have to be very careful

the colors you allow in the frame

and color became somewhat expected all the time

it lost its special nature for me

that was a different way of using color

to different lenses

then different film stocks

so you really had people utilizing color

to tell a story

also in a different way from the studio films

um because they did tell a story there too

all this this obsession with color on film

found its way into

one of the reasons why I did the aviator

and I decided that we're gonna try to do

color in the film

that represented the color as it

as it was available

in whatever process Technicolor had at the time

so if the film starts in 1922

whatever the color looks like

two color will represents two color of that period

and so Sandy Paul

at the design costumes that would play in that color

often I think there's one scene

where they go to the Coconut Grove and uh

uh Cape Blanchett's dress

which is a kind of LA Mei I think um

I believe is a kind of gold color

but I think in actuality was green

and so we tested all of this

the thing about creating that

is really an obsession with color

and slowly the color in aviator slips into

a feeling of a more saturated

three strip Technicolor

and then finally a colder color in the end

but ultimately

I was really one of the reasons for making the picture

and that was not possible really

until the use of the digital intermediate

part of this

part of this is beyond me in terms

I was learning as I was going along um

with um on aviator

and it was a

it was a really a exciting experience

because I was able to use pre visualization

for the first time

taking my notes and little drawings

and transferring them into the previous

Rob the god always doing with me

and so the storyboard came alive in a way

and there was a new way of making pictures in a sense

for the action sequences

I'm talking about the flying scenes

we had seen a beautiful show on color and film

right before we did The Aviator at the Academy in LA

in which they first screened beautiful black and white

nitrate of Midsomer Night stream sections

that you screen sections of it

then they screened

beautiful examples of tinting and toning

from silent films and nitrate prints they had

leading up to full use of color um

and it was really a revelation

even the beautiful um

print they had of east of Eden at that time

cause I recall that color

and 53 and 54 Warner Brothers scope films

had more of a brownish blue feel to them um

as opposed to

as opposed to Fox um

and the films they were making so um uh

there was always a slight difference um

and it became sort of uh

encoded in my head um

and so we use them as references

but I must say that the uh

the use of the di has

they increase the

possibilities of color

and

in a in a way it's strange because there is no limit

very very there's so many possibilities now and

and it's exciting

but at the same time

you have to force yourself to limit those possibilities

and don't let the technology take over you know

because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it