Director Series: Stephen Nakamura

Interviewed by Jack Egan
I am currently working on Kill Bill, Vol. 2. Previous films I worked on include Kill Bill, Vol. 1, Haunted Mansion, Seabiscuit, Pirates of the Caribbean, Envy, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Panic Room. Next up is The Chronicles of Riddick [with Vin Diesel, directed by David Twohy, with cinematography by Hugh Johnson].
I collaborate with all of the cinematographers on the movies that I time. We set looks just like they would in a telecine session. DI wouldn’t work if the display device we were color correcting to did not match the film. Calibration of monitors/projectors is critical to the success of DIs. Each of our projectors is custom-calibrated to match film.
Once we set color, then it’s important that those images get back to film properly so that it looks like what we timed. That is a whole separate process. We have custom look-up tables to get the images back to film when we shoot out our negatives.
The advantages of DI are tremendous: more control over the look of the film, resizing without making opticals, seamless integration of effects shots, creating multiple negatives for release printing—and for the video side of things, conversions of film files to video to create DVD masters from original scanned negative, not IPs or low cons. I don’t really see too much of a drawback to this process. If I was doing a film, I would definitely do a DI.