Director J.J. Abrams got a lot of praise for his use of practical effects—not to mention 100 percent authentic New Jerseyans—in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now, one of Abrams’ successors will continue that old school track record, with Episode IX Chosen One Colin Trevorrow saying he intends to shoot the final installment of the new trilogy on film.
As George Lucas quietly weeps somewhere, surrounded by the digital cameras he’s fashioned into a makeshift, cargo cult family, Trevorrow explained at Sundance that he prefers old-fashioned filmmaking techniques for old-fashioned movies (like the one he apparently intends to make.) “There’s something in my brain that says, ‘well they didn’t have video cameras then,” he said, before confirming that Episode IX would be shot on film.
The Jurassic World director—who also shot that movie on film, presumably because the things he was photographing were millions of years old—was joined by Fruitvale Station cinematographer Rachel Morrison and Christopher Nolan, who blasted what he saw as recent media efforts to overplay problems that occurred during the 70mm roadshow presentation of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. “As if he built the projector,” Nolan mocked, pointing out that digital machines suffer defects, too.
All of this, of course, assumes that movie theaters are still a thing in 2019, when Star Wars: Episode IX is expected to come out—barring any more delays for the massive, space-spanning franchise—and that we won’t all view Trevorrow’s film as a magic lantern show, projected on the broken walls of a bombed-out, dying world, as desolate as the fictitious Jakku.