CineMontage

Fall 2015

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58 CINEMONTAGE / FALL 2015 by Michael Goldman portraits by Wm. Stetz W hen director Quentin Tarantino visualized his newest revenge Western, The Hateful Eight, as a 70mm widescreen production, sold it to distributor The Weinstein Company as such, and eventually upped the vintage widescreen aesthetic further by unearthing vintage lenses at Panavision and filming it in a format that Hollywood had not even attempted to use in almost 50 years — Ultra Panavision 70 — his intent was to make a piece of cinema that was a throwback to the rich, special- event theatrical spectacles of the analog era. Ultra Panavision 70, in fact, was only used for 10 films in history, including Ben Hur (1959) and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and none since 1966's Khartoum. When cinematographer Bob Richardson, ASC, discovered the lenses used on those films last year, and Panavision said it could restore them, Tarantino decided to go full bore and make The Hateful Eight the first Ultra Panavision 70 made in half a century. In a limited release December 25, it will be exhibited about as wide as can be imagined — essentially anamorphic 70mm, with a 2.76:1 aspect ratio. The Wide, Wide West Editor Fred Raskin on Tarantino's 'Hateful Eight' in Ultra Panavision 70 Tarantino went to these lengths for a story about eight violent strangers who cross paths in a claustrophobic, snowbound Wyoming cabin called Minnie's Haberdashery, with some or all of them having the deadliest of intentions. But along the way, the unusual and ambitious nature of the plan required a host of related technical projects beyond restoring the single existing set of dormant lenses

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