The video above is a deleted scene from Christopher Kenneally’s new documentary Side by Side, in which Keanu Reeves talks to many of the world’s great filmmakers and others in the business about digital vs. celluloid. The clip features cinematographer Wally Pfister (Inception; The Dark Knight Rises) talking about working with director Christopher Nolan. I was particularly intrigued about this comment:

“Chris runs around with a tiny Panasonic monitor, battery-powered monitor, next to me, within a foot of me and Bob Hall, my focus puller, and so it’s just the three of us standing around the camera; it’s like a documentary unit.”

Not that it seems that unusual for me to picture a documentary-style crew shooting blockbuster movies. The reason the remark caught my attention is that in Side by Side, Pfister and Nolan are the heaviest on the side against digital filmmaking. And of course nowadays most documentaries are shot on video, and in fact the scene wouldn’t have exploded the way it did in the past decade were it not for cheap digital cameras.

You can watch more outtakes from Side by Side (which sadly doesn’t address the increase in documentary production — Reeves told me in an interview that he wanted to go there and other places they just couldn’t touch in this film) via distributor Tribeca Film, which has been uploading a couple clips daily in the lead-up to the doc’s theatrical and VOD release later this month. 

See my post at Movies.com about/for what they’d shared as of this morning, including one with The Matrix directors Lana and Andy Wachowski talking about performances being made in editing (just like documentaries are!). Tribeca posted another outtake this afternoon, this featuring David Lynch, which didn’t make that earlier post. Here it is:

I’ll have more on this film, including an interview with Kenneally and a link to my interview with Reeves next week. Keep checking the Tribeca YouTube page for more deleted scenes and see the film when it opens in theaters August 17 or on VOD August 22.