Lucasfilm / Disney

Did you enjoy the authentically retro visual trappings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Lucky you, because it's not going anywhere.

J.J. Abrams shot Episode VII on film, and it's a process that his successors are going to continue for at least the remainder of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Speaking at Sundance Film Festival, incoming Episode IX director Colin Trevorrow said he also intended to shoot the movie on actual film, rather than using digital cameras.


Explaining his preference, he compared it to the more authentic look it lends period pieces, saying "There's something in my brain that says, 'well they didn't have video cameras then,'", before joking that the untitled Star Wars: Episode IX is "a period film. It happened a long time ago."

Trevorrow isn't just keeping in line with the style Abrams established, either. When he shot Jurassic World, he and cinematographer did so on a mixture of 35mm and 65mm film.

The benefit to shooting on the seemingly archaic medium is, counter-intuitively, future-proofing. When a movie is shot digitally, it will only ever be the maximum resolution of the technology used at the time. Barring often-messy upconversions, something shot in 1080p, 2K, or 4K will only ever be that native resolution, and as displays get better, the product looks worse.


With film, so long as the reels are well stored, future remasters can be remade at much higher quality than may have been seen at a movie's original release. Just look at the difference between a picture on VHS compared to Blu-ray. And the larger the film stock, the more detail will be captured and made available for future generations.

Although fellow Disney stablemate Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will be the first film shot in digital 8K, that's at the high end of what the human eye will take in and a form of future proofing itself -- most cinemas can't display in 8K yet anyway.

Trevorrow is among a growing number of Hollywood directors championing traditional film, too. Notably, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan are among those evangelising the format, and the resurgence in popularity in recent years has meant that Kodak expects its film business, once on the brink of closure, to return to profit.