The Hollywood Reporter: The Cinematographers Roundtable

Today, I watched A Hollywood Reporter: The Cinematographers Roundtable. I have watched a few of theses before on Directors, Actors and Actresses, I like this format because of the collection of people they bring together and watching them chat amongst each other I feel leads to a more sophisticated conversation about the material. This one however is the first I have watched on Cinematographers.
I felt there was some very interesting concepts brought up within this roundtable. I had never heard of many of these cinematographers but I found it interesting when Matthew Libatique was discussing working with his long time collaborator Darren Aronofsky on films like PI, The Fountain and Black Swan. He discussed that in the beginning of there professional relationship, they would often come to disagreements because every idea they had was trying to be so big in scope. In the sense of being cinematic and with storytelling however, now there relationship has evolved and Libatique describes it as he now tries to have a lighter grip on everything, and tried to be more subtle in his storytelling which I found rather interesting. 
Another point of discussion was a cinematographers mention within film reviews. Now this was intriguing because most of the men at the table describe how it feels reading a one line synopsis of their work in most film reviews. Libatique describes reading a comment like "Stunning Cinematography" as more of an insult than no mention at all, because he sees that as someone who does not understand the cinematography, as 'stunning' is a very generic comment. However I feel Roger Deakins had the best outlook on this, he said that his cinematography is always about what is best for the film and creating the best pair between the two. So his theory is that if the cinematography is that good, it probably won't be mentioned as it highlights the film so well you can't see it as its own entity. 
Finally when discussing Film vs Digital, I was surprised to see that they all agreed on the fact that Film cameras still have a place within out industry but as we all know film projector is dying/dead and they all seemed okay with that. Dick Pope who shot the most recent Mike Leigh film Mr. Turner describes the unreliability of Film projection, and the differences with it from theatre to theatre. He also talks about seeing the film Inherent Vice at a film festival being projected on film, he describes the film as having a 'dirty' look to it, and he was unsure whether they was the effect they wanted or not. All of these men seem to have a positive attitude toward Digital projection because of its reliability and the fact they know that is how the film is supposed to look.
Overall I enjoyed this roundtable and would recommend it to anyone hoping to learn more about cinematography.

Here is the Link to the Roundtable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2Z4UvAdE7E