After shooting his new film on an iPhone, director Steven Soderbergh declared, “I think this is the future.” This bold statement might be great PR for Apple, but could iPhones really be the future of filmmaking?
It’s an understatement to say that making movies is expensive. Studio films regularly cost over $50 million to make, not to mention the additional costs associated with marketing and distribution. Recent successes like Lady Bird and Get Out, both made on smaller budgets before meeting with box office success, still cost millions to make – $10 million and $4.5 million respectively.
That’s an impossible amount for most creators to come up with independently without some serious financial weight behind them. The financial component of making movies is undeniably one of the most significant obstacles preventing greater variation and diversification within the medium. The most popular and powerful institutions in charge of making movies, especially in Hollywood, have little to gain when it comes to taking risks.
However, the growth of the indie movie market in the United States and around the world has encouraged creators to find innovative ways to finance films with shoestring budgets. Unfortunately, this market has hardly reinvented the wheel. Rather than alleviate the obstacles that prevent creators from making movies, the indie market has created smaller thresholds for creators, thresholds that still too high for many aspiring filmmakers.
The opportunity for shooting movies on iPhones serves to increase the accessibility of filmmaking to a larger, more diverse pool of creators. As a popular and more affordable piece of equipment, the iPhone helps put the essential piece of the process more readily into hands of creators. This eliminates, or at the very least reduces, a significant barrier that might otherwise prevent aspiring filmmakers from making their own movies.
Soderbergh’s declaration of support for shooting movies on iPhones comes after his own experience with the technology. His new film Unsane, starring Claire Foy as a woman involuntarily committed to a mental institution, was shot entirely on an iPhone.
Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival last week, Soderbergh assured us that the iPhone is no gimmick: “Anybody going to see this movie who has no idea of the backstory to the production will have no idea this was shot on the phone. That’s not part of the conceit.”
In short, he means that Unsane won’t just be marketed as a movie that was shot on an iPhone. However, based on the first trailer, there’s a clear drop in the picture quality from what we’re used to seeing on the big screen. Check it out for yourself. The first trailer for Unsane dropped today:
Soderbergh is not the first director to shoot a movie entirely on an iPhone. Sean Baker’s 2015 film Tangerine was shot completely on an iPhone, a production that reportedly cost only $100,000. Baker’s newest film The Florida Project also utilizes iPhone technology, shooting the final scene of the film using an iPhone.
Baker and Soderbergh may be opening the door to normalizing the use of iPhones for moviemaking, but it’s by no means an industry standard yet. For now, these films remain outliers in very, very large market. However, Soderbergh sees this low-cost alternative as something that could benefit both creators and distributors: “I’m trying to develop an approach to putting out a movie in wide release that makes some kind of economic sense for the filmmakers and the people that have a participation in the movie. It’s going to take a while.”
Soderbergh seems to see a path where studios could reduce the cost of production, thereby giving them a better chance at turning a profit. This is an ambitious goal that could certainly open the door to smaller projects getting the chance at making it to the big screen.
However, for now it seems naïve to think that iPhone technology would, in and of itself, be a solution to the obstacles faced by aspiring filmmakers. Soderbergh may be leading the charge on this revolution, as a director with experience making movies on a small budget, but he’s acquired enough social and financial capital in this career to give him the leeway to take such risks. If he makes a movie on an iPhone, he won’t face the skepticism and doubts that a new filmmaker would.
There’s a significant difference between an established director like Soderbergh, an Oscar winner with more than 40 directing credits to his name, making a movie on an iPhone versus an unknown and aspiring director doing the same. Soderbergh carries a legitimacy, afforded to him by decades of playing by the rules, whereas new directors will face many of the same obstacles trying to break into the industry.
Moreover, any movement supporting low-cost, digital filmmaking will find at odds with those creators advocating for shooting and releasing movies on film. In 2017, both Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights) and Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception) released new films shot and distributed on film. Phantom Thread and Dunkirk were both given select 70mm releases that were meant to emphasize the value of preserving a more traditional way of making movies.
Given the current landscape, it seems impossible that iPhones could eclipse those industry norms that dictate the process of movie making. While Soderbergh and Baker may be helping to mainstream the use of iPhones, making them more readily a part of the toolbox used by filmmakers, they are a ways off from revolutionizing the process of financing and making movies.
The camera itself, while the most essential part of making a movie, is very much an extension of the money given to those who will hold it. As long as the money is kept out of the hands of those willing to use these new innovations, they will remain outliers.