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Perspektivwechsel| HFF 27 die Aufteilung in Dokumenarfilm- und Spielfilmkamera. Hier haben wir im letzten Seminar einen Vergleich der verschiedenen Formate angestellt, 16, 35, 65mm und digital, anhand einer kleinen Geschichte. Könnte es denn auch für Sie eine Rückkehr nach Amerika geben, ins große Kinogeschäft? Nein, es bleibt dabei: „Departed“ war ein sehr schöner Abschluss. Und ein Höhepunkt für Martin Scorsese, auch des Oscars wegen … Naja, vor zwei Wochen hat er mich angerufen und gefragt, ob ich Lust hätte, ein Com- mercial zu machen … Da konnte ich nicht Nein sagen. Interview with Michael Ballhaus, Director of Photography Given the rapid development of the digital field, is there a future in the big studio production work? Ballhaus: Of course a large part of the work in this profession will take place in the digital sphere in the future. But along- side that there will still be plenty of work with film. Arri has just brought out a new 16 mm camera, which is extremely successful, mainly with the television stations. They work a lot with digital, but they’re not sure how long the digital data will keep, how they should save it and how much saving it will cost. If you put the data on a hard disk, how will it look in ten years, and will we still have the equip- ment to play it on? … The development there is really unbelievable. If you shoot on film stock, the material is stored in the bunker and doesn’t last ten years, but rather twenty or thirty. So it’ll be above all daily material they’ll make digitally, all the stuff that probably won’t be broadcast ten years later. With these prospects – that you are no longer shooting for posterity – the con- cept and attitude of the filmmakers should no doubt change … I can’t imagine that Scorsese would shoot digitally. To make a film like “Gangs of New York” on digital is inconceivable to me. Unless it was really some up-to- the-minute occurrence. Fassbinder, on the other hand, made a lot of films as if they were newspapers – a day later they’d lost their actuality. In their educational standards, can German film schools keep up with the international ones? I wouldn’t say that we can keep up – but rather that we’re better. I know three film schools in America, including UCLA in Los Angeles and NYU in New York. The students at the German schools have many more possibilities and more materi- al at their disposal. […] In Germany the training is far more precise, to the great surprise of the Americans. In your seminars, how close is the work to real working conditions? We try to work very closely to practical conditions, including the limitations of time and budget. I make sure they don’t try and make everything too perfect. Sometimes you have to realize a student’s idea even if you know in advance that it won’t function. He’ll always learn more through his mistakes than through his successes. […] Ideally, we prepare in the first week by watching films, one a day, and students ask questions about them. Then we’ll maybe look at a scene again and analyze how it was made. In other words, film history is always part of your work? That is very important! You can learn so much from older films and directors. When I shot “Dracula” with Coppola, the first thing he said was: “Our role model is Murnau’s Nosferatu” – a film from 1922.