In a recent phone interview with
Yahoo!, Spielberg talked about his reaction to seeing
Raiders of the Lost Ark in its new IMAX format:
“I didn’t know if the 1981 print would stand up to a full IMAX transfer, so I came expecting a sort of grainy, muddy, and overly enlarged representation of the movie I had made [31] years ago. And I was blown away by the fact that it looked better than the movie I had made [31] years ago.”
Spielberg also commented on the refinement that the conversion process lent to the original film, improving on a number of areas:
“All the shadows in the earlier scenes that we shot in Hawaii [were] always kind of muddy anyway on 35mm, because we couldn’t schlep all of our big arc lights down into this valley. Suddenly, there was definition in the shadows, which I had never seen before. And the shadows weren’t murky and washed out; they were sharp as a tack. I sat there, I think, probably with my mouth open a little wider than it normally is.”
It wasn’t only the visual experience that was improved, but the audio as well. In an interview with
The NY Times, Spielberg called out a particular scene involving a rolling boulder that he says:
“When the boulder is rolling, chasing Indy through the cave, you really feel the boulder in your stomach, the way you do when a marching band passes by, and you’re standing right next to it.”
As far as changes made during the digital post-conversion process, Spielberg said he learned his lesson from
E.T. and won’t be meddling with his own movies in the future:
No, there’s no aesthetic changes to the films. I’m not going back and doing to any of my movies that are now coming out on Blu-ray what I did when “E.T.” was reissued for the third time and I made some digital changes in the picture. I’m not doing that any more. I’ve resigned myself to accepting that what the film was at the time of its creation is what it always should be for future generations. I’m no longer a digital revisionist.
Q. That’s something you learned from your experience with “E.T.”?
A.I learned from the fans. And now of course, we have the other group of fans who only know the other “E.T.” with the digital augmentation and that has become their standard for receiving that story. The only thing I think we can do is continue to manufacture and put out both versions. But it’s too complicated to that with any of my other movies – I’m pretty much going to release those films the way they were originally made.
