The FotoKem team juggled a multitude of workflow processes and film formats for PT Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another: processing negative every day, scanning the 35mm VistaVision format in high resolution for dailies and finishing, traditional color timing for dailies, answer, and release prints, and a ton of optical conversions and traditional film handling. Not to mention creating release prints for 35mm VistaVision, 5-perf, and 15-perf 70mm, as the film will be enjoying a limited release on VistaVision 35mm 8-perf as well.
Lensed by Michael Bauman, One Battle After Another marks the first time a major US film has been both shot and released in VistaVision since 1955’s Strategic Air Command. One-Eyed Jacks (1961) is often erroneously given that distinction but that film was only shot on VistaVision, and VistaVision prints were never made, as its horizontal projection system, by and large, had been phased out in theaters by that time. Says FotoKem Senior VP Film Sales and Operations Andrew Oran, “VistaVision was almost exclusively a capture format, not exhibition format. Only a handful of VistaVision release prints were ever made in the ’50s. It was too hard to keep those VistaVision projectors running out in the field.”
Soon after One-Eyed Jacks, VistaVision went largely dormant even as a capture format, aside from a few European and Japanese films such as the 1976 film by Nagisa Ōshima, In the Realm of the Senses and the 1979 film by Shohei Imamura, Vengeance is Mine.
Yet the format soon found a new home, in special effects. Films such as Star Wars took advantage of VistaVision’s high resolution and negative size, which allowed for more flexibility and realism in optical compositing.
But the story of VistaVision doesn’t end on the optical printer. Brady Corbet’s 2024 film The Brutalist, photographed by Lol Crawley BSC — heralded a return to the use of VistaVision as an origination format on major motion pictures after decades of marginalization.
The workflow for One Battle After Another mixed two paths, digital and traditional analog film neg cutting and optical printing. That involved scanning all negative for editorial and ultimately digital finishing, while also printing select negative to analog film, creating rolls of circled takes so that Anderson could assess his work projected on film while in production, and assess his edit in post via assembled workprint.
This parallel process gave Anderson a lot of freedom to experiment and to make his film look and feel exactly as he wanted. For example, once the VistaVision negative cut was completed, the answer print was available as a reference for the digital grade. In a similar vein, sequences that were fine-tuned in the digital grade informed the answer print process. Additionally during that time, “We tested a VistaVision to 5-perf optical blowup and he fell in love with that too, so then we were doing optical blow-ups for for some reels while release printing others” says Oran.
But that experimentation, that back-and-forth, that trial-and-error is what the FotoKem team lives for, and we have to say: we had a blast helping Anderson achieve his vision.
And the end result? We hope you’ll agree, it was all worth it.
Check out the trailer for One Battle After Another here.
Hear what PT Anderson has to say about the VistaVision format here.
The venues offering the film in VistaVision at press time are the Vista Theater in Los Angeles, the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston, Regal Union Square 17 in New York City, and the Odeon Leicester Square in London.
