A few days ago, the latest movie from the Academy Award-winning director Claude Lelouche opened at the world’s premier film festival, in Cannes. It was part-shot on iPhone, something that the director regards as the future. He even said that other movie greats would have wanted to use it: “Orson Welles would have loved shooting with an iPhone. It will change the history of the cinema.”
As the 82-year-old Lelouch stepped off the red carpet on the Croisette and into the cinema, the audience rose to their feet and burst into an impromptu rendition of the theme tune to his 1966 movie A Man and a Woman. This new film is the third in that series.
That theme tune, by the way, may well be familiar and you can hear it here. Even if you’ve never heard it, I’m warning you now, it’s charming and unbelievably catchy. It will stay with you all day. It goes: Daa daa daaaaaaa, daba-daba-da daba-daba-da, boom, da da da, daba-daba-da daba-daba-da … Well, you need to hear it, really.
Lelouch’s new film, The Best Years of a Life, then, was partly shot using an iPhone. Maxime Heraud, the Director of Photography (DoP) who has worked with Lelouch a lot, told me that over a quarter of the movie was shot on iPhone and that Lelouch and he already have another film in the can, this time completely shot on an Apple handset.
The camera he’d been dreaming of
It may not be the same as a professional rig costing $100,000, but even so, Heraud insisted, “It’s really, really good. It delivers a picture that can transmit an emotion. Really. Because it’s so small and light you can put the camera everywhere, it can move fast. It’s like a painter discovering a new color. This is a new color. If you have a shot where people are running, it’s perfect for that kind of shot, for example. You can do whatever you want even in situations which are normally hard, like a confined space.”
Heraud also put this innovation in historical context. “There was a revolution in the early sixties, the nouvelle vague, when the 35mm camera meant directors could shoot in many situations that weren’t possible before. You could be free with the camera because it was so light. When A Man and a Woman came out, American directors like Scorsese and Coppola said, ‘I want to shoot like this.’ Claude took the 35mm camera to get close to the actors so it’s not acting, it's life. You can’t know if it's life or not. Claude says his eye is his camera. Well, he says he has the same feeling with the iPhone. The control is light, you can see it all, there’s no eyepiece, you see it directly, you can see the reality here. He told me it was the camera he’d been dreaming of his entire life.”
The iPhone rig and FiLMiC Pro
To be clear, Lelouch and Heraud weren’t just walking around, holding an iPhone in landscape orientation and hoping for the best. Heraud designed a professional rig consisting of a cage where the iPhone sits, a gimbal to mimic the effects of a Steadicam, an external lens and a motorized filter so that shots which move from a darkish room to bright outdoor light can work. Even so, the cost of all the materials is still affordable - the cage is called the Beastgrip Pro and has been used by Steven Soderbergh, too. It costs just $139.99 or $169.95 with a wide-angle lens from beastgrip.com.
Even the moviemaking software, FiLMiC Pro, is just $14.99 on the Apple App Store (it’s also available for Android). This is one of those dream apps: sophisticated and feature-packed but still accessible and intuitive to use. You can adjust exposure and focus separately, use clever features to analyze which parts of the image have a color temperature that’s too hot, or even build an automated focus pull into a shot – something that Hollywood movies have a dedicated staffer, imaginatively called a focus puller, to provide.
Neill Barham, one of the guys who dreamt up the app in Seattle, explained, “It’s designed to be a filmmaker’s tool, a cinema camera in your pocket, but you’ll find that with some very basic knowledge within the app you’re going to achieve some pretty high-quality results in just your first few minutes.”
As you progress, there are tutorials online that are quick to watch and help you use more advanced features.
The closest to an eye you can get
Lelouch had more to say about why he loves using the iPhone as his movie camera. "I prefer shooting with an iPhone as no one is realizing that I am filming. It's the closest to an eye you can get. Also, it’s such a tiny difference in the result from a traditional camera that only professionals would know the difference. The importance is the emotion you capture, and that is easier to capture with an iPhone than anything else.”
So, will it catch on as a professional movie director’s weapon of choice? Steven Soderbergh is a fan, making this year’s High Flying Bird on the iPhone with FiLMiC Pro and Sean Baker’s Tangerine was a hit at Sundance in 2015. Only last week, British filmmaker Victoria Mapplebeck won a BAFTA for Best Short Form Programme which was shot on iPhone X using FiLMiC Pro.
Heraud has high hopes for the future: “Some DoPs will say they won’t shoot like this. I understand but you need to open your mind and believe that this is going to be the revolution. It’s going to be a revolution.”
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