(continued...) DC: Do you consider yourself an artist? Rodriguez: I’m a filmmaker; I don’t really like just to direct in and of itself. That’s what I love about HD; it makes it possible to do all the jobs yourself if you want, because it’s that easy to be creative. It may sound kind of crazy but it really frees you to be a shoot-from-the-hip filmmaker telling the stories you want very easily and quickly. Again, it’s just like the Avid. You don’t need to have several people there to take your film and hang it in bins and then go find it. It’s all there automatically so you can just sit there and cut your whole movie if you want. Actually, for me the most fun is editing. But to edit something really cool you’ve got to be the guy writing it, getting the right shots, making sure it looks nice, and getting the performances. You’ve got to kind of do everything to get to that point where you can then be the editor who gets to put it all together and see the end results. DC: Visual effects were an important part of Spy Kids; did digital HD help in that regard when you shot the sequel? Rodriguez: Any time you do an optical in film you lose another generation. It’s much easier to pull a matte digitally than with film. With HD it pulls as quick as it would from regular video. It’s instant. When we filmed the first Spy Kids we wanted to get the cleanest images for pulling mattes, so we shot slower film stock, which meant a lot more lights on the green screen, which is a lot more money. And I still wasn’t satisfied with how it looked. I’d visit the effects guys and they were having so much trouble pulling mattes, taking the grain away, pulling the matte, putting the grain back in. I mean it was just ridiculous. Film is so archaic, it’s just not worth it anymore. We did a lot of green screen on Spy Kids 2 and it was so much easier this time. DC: Explosions, stunts, and slow-motion effects are key to your movies; how did you overcrank 24p? Rodriguez: I actually got the slow-motion idea from E-Film. They had done a test for me and it worked really well, to use the 60i. Now my effects company, Troublemaker Digital Studios, does the slow-motion conversion. They make it 30 frames per second or 60 frames per second, which looks really rich and good. Now when I want it slow motion, I shoot at 60i. Originally I wasn’t sure if the slow-motion tests would work, so for the first two days we had a 35mm camera on set; it looked like a dinosaur. That was our crash camera. And then right after the second day the tests came back, and the slow-motion was satisfactory, we got rid of the film camera. But I did get to record a few explosions with both the film camera and HD, and HD held up much better than film. The explosion wasn’t as rich on film as it was on the HD. I was really surprised about that because it was in a dark room and I thought the stop difference would just blow out completely and the HD wouldn’t retain the detail of the film. But it was completely the opposite. It looked horrible on film. It’s so contrasty that it doesn’t even look like an explosion. If you set up your HD cameras up right you can really get some incredible things. DC: What lenses did you use? Rodriguez: To shoot Mexico I bought several different lenses. I bought an Angeniuex that I like a lot, and a couple of the Fujinon zooms. I always do my own camerawork, and I like the freedom of zooms. On film the image always sufferes when you would use the zoom, but with HD I could get all my different lens sizes within one take, because I’m also the editor of the film. So if I’m sitting there shooting I’m not going to shoot a whole take wide and then a whole take tight. I do my wides and my tight coverage and medium coverage within the same take because I already know how I’m going to cut it together. Johnny Depp kept saying, "What I love the most is I don’t know if you’re full-body on me or right on my eyeball, and I love that because I know I can’t fake it in any way. I never know where you are with that take, because it’s not like the old days where it’s ‘Oh, you’ve got a 50mm on me? I’ll act a certain way.’ Or, ‘It’s a 250mm? Okay, I’ll be more subtle.’" You can’t do that now. DC: Did you do any special processing to the 24p HDCAM signal; was it captured on other media, other than the recorder inside the camera? Rodriguez: The only time we did that is when we used the 950. We used the 950 a few times to have a more mobile camera, but even then I think we just recorded to a regular deck. We didn’t do anything like George [Lucas] might have done -- recording to hard drive. We didn’t get that fancy yet. But hopefully the next step, when we get to that, would be going 10-bit with the recording medium. DC: Were there any special challenges in shooting in digital HD? Rodriguez: You should always check your back focus in temperature changes. That’s just something that you have to be aware of. You have check the monitors to see if something’s going soft. DC: Was audio recorded on the HDCAM or on a separate system? Rodriguez: We did it both ways. We had it going to the HDCAM, but the second system was what we resynched everything to later using a hard-drive recorder. DC: Are you happy with the quality of your HD images? Rodriguez: I’ve seen the film-out, and it’s incredible, it’s very rich. I took advantage of what HD offers when I did the set design. I lit them very rich, and the colors are like watching a Technicolor movie. It’s so rich and beautiful to watch that I think it’s going to wake a lot of people up. People aren’t going to believe how good these images are. They’ll be pinching themselves. DC: George Lucas at last year’s NAB said he’d never shoot another film on film again. Do you feel the same way? Rodriguez: Absolutely. I don’t even shoot still pictures on film anymore. I buried my Nikon. I have kids, and film is just ridiculous for shooting them. You know when you’ve got the shot so you can walk away knowing that you’ve captured the moment. DC: What advice would you offer to other directors considering using digital 24p HD instead of film? Rodriguez: Digital requires a learning curve. You have to get in there and use it. It’s hard to find anyone to teach you because everyone has a different way of doing it and not all of them work. You’re not going to find that out until you’re a few weeks into filming. You’ve got to be aware that that always happens with a new medium. But the rewards of digital HD are just so great. And since you’ve got a monitor there there’s not a whole lot you can’t fix. It’s really worth the challenge. There’s a lot of things you can do to the camera. If the image doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t right. So I would just tell them to get into it because digital is the future. It’s really where things will be going. DC: What would you say to filmmakers who are intimidated by digital HD? Rodriguez: They shouldn’t. Editors were afraid when Avids were being introduced. They said, "We have to change our whole way of working and learn all this computer stuff." But now everyone edits on them. With digital HD they’ve just got to get over it and learn and embrace the new technology so they’re not dinosaurs. HD is their friend. They don’t have to be guessing anymore. They can really do much better, much edgier, much more exciting lighting because they are able to see the result instead of waiting for that dreaded daily report to come in. They can find out right then and there if it worked. HD is in its infancy. This is the worst it will look. I can’t wait for the next generation. 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