The Rise of the iPhone Auteur
Steven Soderbergh’s ‘High Flying Bird’ is the latest movie to be filmed entirely on a smartphone. While the technique has yet to catch on en masse, its proponents talk about its democratizing and artistically liberating effects—and it could very well be the future of filmmaking.The Rise of the iPhone Auteur
Steven Soderbergh’s ‘High Flying Bird’ is the latest movie to be filmed entirely on a smartphone. While the technique has yet to catch on en masse, its proponents talk about its democratizing and artistically liberating effects—and it could very well be the future of filmmaking.
In Steven Soderbergh’s latest feat of fast-paced film production, High Flying Bird, which will launch on Netflix this Friday, a renegade agent tries to end an NBA lockout by destabilizing the sport’s financial structure. As the work stoppage stretches toward the six-month mark, two prominent players who’ve been trading putdowns on Twitter go viral by engaging in an impromptu pickup game at a charity event. No professional footage of the grudge match exists, but videos shot by kids in the crowd and posted on social media garner many millions of views, without the NBA’s imprimatur or the gloss of a telecast by the league’s big-budget broadcast partners. The grassroots success sows seeds of doubt about an entrenched system that the stalling league owners had believed to be unassailable. The player-powered revolution is shot on smartphones.
High Flying Bird is a product of what Soderbergh believes to be a similar upheaval in the Hollywood system. Shot entirely on an iPhone 8, High Flying Bird is Soderbergh’s second smartphone film, following last year’s psychological thriller Unsane, which he shot in two weeks on an iPhone Seven Plus. Soderbergh, who has habitually sought to upend the economics of movies, remove impediments to production, and concentrate control in filmmakers’ hands, is a predictable proselytizer for a relatively unproven method of moviemaking. In January 2018, just prior to the release of Unsane, Soderbergh declared phones “the future” of filmmaking and, when asked whether he’d use smartphones exclusively for subsequent projects, added, “I’d have to have a pretty good reason not to be thinking about that first.”
The case for smartphones as a disruptive force in film—both as a democratizing implement for low-budget directors and as a budget-slashing or artistically liberating tool for higher-profile projects—is growing stronger as smartphone-camera hardware and the software supporting it improves, and as the list of past precedents lengthens. In addition to helping smartphone manufacturers jockey for market share, each incremental camera upgrade shrinks the visual gap between pocket-containable cameras and the big rigs endemic to studio sets. Even so, it’s not just inertia that’s making iPhone-filmed movies outliers among major projects; some technological limitations are still relegating releases like High Flying Bird to the realm of curiosity. Despite Soderbergh’s unreserved endorsement, taking the smartphone plunge remains a complicated balance of benefits and trade-offs for most mainstream moviemakers.
“Anybody going to see this movie who has no idea of the backstory to the production will have no idea this was shot on the phone,” Soderbergh said of Unsane in 2018. “That’s not part of the conceit.” It’s true that the movie doesn’t draw attention to its means of production, aside from a few winks in the script; in one recursive, Spider-Man-meme-style scene, protagonist Sawyer (Claire Foy) FaceTimes with her mother, and in another possibly self-referential moment, Matt Damon, making a cameo as a security consultant, instructs Sawyer to “think of your cellphone as your enemy.” But although the iPhone filming itself is all non-diegetic—the characters aren’t ostensibly using their smartphones to record the footage the audience sees, as was the case in a 2015 episode of sitcom Modern Family—the visuals are still easily distinguishable from a “normal” movie.
“To me, the technology hasn’t advanced to the point where an iPhone movie won’t look like an iPhone movie,” says actor Joshua Leonard, who played Sawyer’s antagonist in Unsane. Leonard continues, “I think anybody using the iPhone technology right now will be integrating that aesthetic that the phone gives into their movie.”
The hallmarks—some might say flaws, although that depends on the project—of smartphone footage are poorer performance in low-light conditions and a wide depth of field, or a difficulty in focusing on objects in the foreground while blurring out the background. Because of physical constraints related to the size of the cameras that can comfortably fit into tiny packages, smartphone footage tends to place all objects in focus, which yields a less traditionally cinematic aesthetic (although the same look has been purposefully employed to great effect in classics such as Citizen Kane).
High Flying Bird is probably the least iPhone-looking iPhone film yet, but upon close inspection, some details (or lack of details) expose its cinéma vérité trappings. An agent slams a mug down on his desk, and the camera jiggles. Some finer features of faces and scenes disappear into shadows. Some shots seem jittery or exhibit pronounced lens flare. Still, it’s a stretch to say that any of these elements, which would probably be absent from a more full-featured production, appreciably detract from the experience. A casual viewer—say, one who wasn’t attending a press screening in preparation for a piece about iPhone-made movies—would likely forget about the film’s slightly atypical look after getting engrossed in the story. “If I had a traditional camera package … the film I think would not have been any better,” Soderbergh said on The Bill Simmons Podcast last month. “It might have been worse. It certainly would have taken longer.”
High Flying Bird could hardly have taken less time; Soderbergh finished the first cut of the film less than three hours after wrapping principal photography. He’s always worked quickly and economically, but embracing the iPhone seems to have accelerated his already rapid pace.
“I’ve never moved as fast on a production as we did on Unsane,” Leonard says, adding, “I think part of that was due to technology and the lack of lighting. We only had a single LED panel that we used for the entire shoot, and even that panel only got broken out one of every four, five scenes or so. … [Soderbergh] goes into the day knowing exactly the shots that he wants, and then I think the technology, both the speed of the iPhone and its ability to move around the room and get in inaccessible spaces, allows for a profound conflation between impulse and executions for him, so for us actors there’s never any waiting around.”
Unsane cost a reported $1.5 million to make. High Flying Bird expanded Soderbergh’s budget all the way to $2 million, despite the presence of well-known actors including André Holland, Zazie Beetz, and Kyle MacLachlan. Cost savings are part of the iPhone-made movie’s appeal, and the intersection of art and commerce is central to the genre’s brief history.
In 2012, an iPhone 4s held its own in the equipment company Zacuto’s Great Camera Shootout, an image-quality battle between initially unidentified brands, even though it was competing with much more expensive cameras. That turned some heads in the industry, but Neill Barham, the founder and CEO of FiLMiC Inc., which makes the popular iOS and Android camera-enhancement app FiLMiC Pro, points to a 2014 Bentley ad as a watershed development in the professional adoption of the smartphone camera. The film, which was intended to promote the Bentley Mulsanne’s integration of technology, made use of grip equipment and apps (including FiLMiC Pro) to stabilize the phones and optimize the footage.
“They finished it in black and white and had a great contrast ratio,” Barham says. “It looked amazing, and it was sort of the first thing that caused a large group of people to be like, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that was shot with a smartphone?’”
In late 2011, a report circulated that iPhone footage had been used in The Avengers, but that belief, based on a poorly edited interview, was debunked. The Bentley ad wasn’t nearly as visible as a supporting role in a $1.5 billion blockbuster would have been, but it did attract more than a million views on YouTube, and it was the real deal. The iPhone film’s next big breakthrough came courtesy of the Duplass brothers–produced, Sean Baker–directed indie darling Tangerine, which was shot on the iPhone 5s and made a statement at Sundance.
“Sean was adamant that he didn’t want it to be seen as an iPhone movie, although that’s often one of the big story lines,” says Julie Gerstenberger, cofounder and CEO of Moondog Labs, which makes cinematic, wide-angle lenses for smartphones, including those that were used in Tangerine and High Flying Bird. “It was not mentioned before the premiere that it was filmed on iPhone, and so one of the last credits was ‘Shot on iPhone 5s’ with, we called it, first-edition Moondog Labs anamorphic lenses. And there was literally a gasp that went through the audience, because people hadn’t been able to really notice anything that you could attribute to, ‘Oh, it was shot on phones.’”
Other short and feature films had been shot wholly or partially on iPhones prior to Tangerine, including the Oscar-winning 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man. But Baker’s story of a day in the life of two transgender sex workers—which featured a largely unknown cast, won several prestigious awards, and earned a 97 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes—was the most convincing proof of concept up to that point. Baker, a lover of physical film, initially decided to experiment with iPhones for budgetary reasons—Tangerine cost only $100,000—but he grew to appreciate the ease of access they permitted and the naturalistic performances the familiar devices elicited from his inexperienced cast. In 2017, one of the iPhones he used to make Tangerine was acquired by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, cementing the movie’s milestone status.
In the wake of Tangerine’s success, the smartphone movement spread, from Baker’s 2016 short-film follow-up Snowbird to Steven Caple Jr.’s 2016 drama The Land to Michel Gondry’s 2017 short film Détour to Baker’s critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 2017 feature film The Florida Project. The ads kept coming, too, for Apple and Google and Nike, with all three of those spots utilizing lenses made by Moondog competitor Moment, which Soderbergh used on Unsane. Although The Florida Project marked a return to more traditional filmmaking methods—in part, Baker said, because “I was becoming the iPhone guy, and I wanted to flip it”—it did enlist an iPhone for its final scene.
Each artistic triumph bolstered the iPhone camera’s credentials, but improvements under the hood mattered just as much, if not more. FiLMiC Pro, which Barham says has been downloaded 2 million times (mostly on iOS) and which Baker, Gondry, and Soderbergh have used to finish their films, debuted in May 2011, following the 2010 release of the iPhone 4, the first model to shoot high-definition video at 720p resolution. The iPhone 4, Barham says, “didn’t have image stabilization, didn’t have a telephoto lens, didn’t have a lot of things. … At the time I was basically like a post-film-school brat, and the idea was, ‘Hey, this would make a great B-roll camera.’”
Barham explains that FiLMiC Pro’s goals are “to be 30 to 70 percent better than whatever is the cutting edge coming out of Cupertino or Samsung or Google” and to “replicate all of the functionality that you would find” in a $20,000 to $40,000 camera, via increased control of aspect ratio, color grading, and other advanced settings that most smartphones manipulate automatically. When his app appeared, he says, the industry’s “broader response was almost sort of cynicism. Like, ‘Making a film on a smartphone, that’ll be the day,’ or ‘That’s a joke.’ Nobody really took us seriously.”
Gradually, though, the cameras made gains. The iPhone 4s shot in 1080p high definition. The 5s shot 120 frames per second slow motion at 720p. The 6 added “cinematic image stabilization” and shot in even slower slow motion, while the 6s shot in 4K resolution. “In my mind, the 6s Plus was the first fully mature smartphone video camera, capable of a 4K image with optical image stabilization normally found on high-end cameras and optics,” Barham says.
Each new smartphone generation brings higher frame rates, higher resolutions, and bigger screens. Those specs, along with accompanying refinements in supplementary lenses and image-processing software, have made mobile devices more viable as the backbones of a professional production. “I don’t think people are aware of how advanced this technology really is and what you can do with it,” Soderbergh told Simmons.
An adept director of a smartphone-made movie can convert the camera’s shortcomings into strengths by pairing the right projects with the compact technology. Unsane, for instance, drew criticism for its shadowy, low-light look. Thematically, though, the visuals suited a story about a psychologically stressed subject who’s questioning her sanity (although they couldn’t close all of the plot holes).
“The iPhone itself does have a certain aesthetic that was unnerving,” Leonard says. “Steven used it for lots of close-ups, which I think he said [wasn’t] something that he traditionally does, but [was] something that he really wanted to play with with the iPhone, getting right up in people’s faces. The profound depth of field that you get in every shot, where every single piece of the frame is in focus, made for an uncomfortable experience in a way that I think served the movie quite well.” Similarly, Tangerine’s unorthodox production style dovetailed with its boundary-breaking cast, and in The Florida Project’s denouement, shedding the bonds of the more staid (albeit striking) setup used throughout the film mirrored the liberation of its child characters.
Although visual fidelity is an important part of a film’s foundation, a better performance can compensate for an instance of unintentional lens flare here or a loss of focus there. Casting actors like Holland, Beetz, and MacLachlan is one way to elicit high-level performances, but an unobtrusive smartphone can also pay dividends in that department, even for experienced actors. That’s partly because a more seamless production is less likely to take actors out of the moment.
“On a traditional movie set, you’ll shoot one side of a scene, and then everybody will walk away and have a cup of coffee and read the paper and come back 45 minutes later when the lighting’s turned around on the other side, and that was not the case ever on [Unsane],” Leonard says. “On [Unsane], it was very much, once you started filming a scene, you never stopped until the scene was done. And for actors, especially, that’s a real fun way to shoot, because you’re not constantly trying to re-energize yourself and remember where you were emotionally when you shot the first part of the scene hours before.”
In the age of selfies and ubiquitous smartphones, there’s also a familiarity effect that can lead to less self-consciousness. “The equipment itself takes up so little space in the room,” Leonard says. “It calls no attention to itself, and it’s such an omnipresent piece of technology that it’s far easier to ignore its existence. I think, for us, that really fostered a sense of intimacy and a feeling like we were the only people in the room. In that sense, it was more like rehearsal for stage acting than it was like shooting a traditional movie.”
Finally, smartphones allow directors to capture their cast from adventurous angles and in situations and settings that would otherwise be prohibitive for logistical reasons. As Soderbergh said to Simmons, “What’s great about the iPhone is I can put it anywhere. Literally, I can Velcro it to a ceiling, I can do whatever I want, and that’s very liberating.” Mimicking the iconic overhead shot toward the end of Taxi Driver would no longer require cutting out the floor of the apartment above.
Along the same lines, Barham recalls Baker talking about “how you can basically go anywhere, shoot anything, and nobody would take any notice and think that you’re actually making a film. Everybody just assumes that you’re playing around, goofing off with your friends and shooting something that’s going to go to YouTube.” The authentic-looking surroundings and organic bystander reactions from the public-bus scene in Tangerine, the Disney World ending of The Florida Project, and the street scenes amid Manhattan’s hustle and bustle in High Flying Bird are all by-products of smartphone filming’s clandestine credo: Shoot first and ask for releases later.
“There’s just something about shooting on location and being close to your actors that’s a perfect antidote [to] the sort of like ‘Everything’s shot on a green screen, the CGI is added in after the fact so the actors don’t even really know where they are in the room’ [style],” Barham says. He adds, “It kind of feels like smartphone filmmaking is to contemporary filmmakers what 16 mm and the French New Wave was back in the ’60s: cheaper, faster, and more honest in a way.”
Although professional movies made on smartphones aren’t shot with the same carelessness that millions of amateur directors exhibit in documenting their dogs’ and cats’ cuteness, even the accoutrements of serious smartphone filming—apps, editing software, external microphones, lenses, and grips—amount to much less expense than once would have been required to create a similar-looking result. Soderbergh has made big-budget movies and could choose to make more, but non-Oscar-winning directors without that option are benefiting from a lower barrier to entry.
“The true benefit right now lies not within the Hollywood system, but outside of the Hollywood system, where anybody who wants to make a movie who can afford a smartphone can now make a movie without any excuses or any waiting around, because those doors have been busted down,” Leonard says. As Soderbergh told Simmons, “You really don’t need much more than what’s in your pocket and some software, and off you go.”
Victoria Mapplebeck is among the many independent filmmakers who’ve made the most of the new paradigm. Mapplebeck, a U.K.-based director who studied film at art college in the ’80s, has made two award-winning short smartphone films, 160 Characters (2015) on the iPhone 6 and Missed Call (2018) on the iPhone X, about her unplanned pregnancy, single parenthood, and her son’s subsequent quest to connect with his father. Her latest film is The Waiting Room, a documentary about her own breast-cancer diagnosis and treatment that will be released with funding from The Guardian later this year.
When she began making films in the ’90s, Mapplebeck says, “My first budget for Channel 4 was £30,000, which now seems like an enormous budget for a first-time filmmaker. … That was seen as tiny money at that point.” For 160 Characters, which she says has been viewed more than a million times via various online channels, she chose to work with an iPhone for added intimacy and spontaneity and because she liked the idea of capturing text exchanges conducted on a smartphone with a smartphone camera. But there were also practical considerations. “The Film London budget I had was only £2,000, and I put a bit of my own money that I’d won from a prize into the pot,” she says. Using FiLMiC Pro and minimal equipment, she made the film for “about £4,500,” whereas “a decent professional [camera] kit” alone, she explains, would have cost her £5,000 to £6,000.
When she began to chronicle her fight against cancer, Mapplebeck says, “I found it really cathartic to document the whole process. I was able to film in difficult hospital situations, like my radiotherapy and my chemotherapy. Of course, you look like an amateur, you look like you’re doing some kind of selfie or you’re sending a clip to a friend. You don’t look like a filmmaker with all of the distrust that that can bring when you’re shooting.”
Mapplebeck is a testament to the fact that, as Gerstenberger says, “[The smartphone] gives a lot more autonomy to tell a story that you’re really passionate about that might not be seen as quite as commercially viable. And you can do that with a smaller budget and still have something that has the quality and production value that could get distribution after the fact.”
That may mean more diverse directors, more diverse stories, and more effective activism. It may mean more mid-tier movies finding room on release schedules amid massive superhero franchises. It may also mean more experimentation with the form. Leonard, who made his acting debut on Hi8 and CP-16 cameras two decades ago in The Blair Witch Project, says, “If we were shooting Blair Witch today and the documentary filmmakers within the movie still wanted a film aesthetic, we’d be using an old 16-mm camera and iPhones to shoot each other, and it wouldn’t just be one person shooting the behind-the-scenes stuff, it would be all three of us shooting each other because that’s the society we live in.”
According to Barham, three-time Oscar winner and film-editing luminary Walter Murch is working with smartphone footage in post-production on his upcoming documentary project, Coup 53, and finding it comparable to more conventional fare. Director George Miller, inspired by Tangerine, has also expressed a desire to make a movie on an iPhone. Smartphones are slowly opening eyes at Hollywood’s highest levels, and the industry could be one or two technological leaps away from directors much less iconoclastic than Soderbergh getting in on the act. “I think now we’re about to be in a space where you’re going to have a camera about the size of a phone, with a full-size sensor, and that’ll be a game changer,” Soderbergh told Simmons.
According to recent reports, Apple will launch an iPhone model equipped with three cameras later this year, an attempt to keep pace with other phones that have already surpassed that camera count. “It is quite possible the next-generation iPhones will be a tipping point for creative potential for smartphones with regard to variable depth of field,” Barham says. Providing greater control over depth of field would strip away one of the most compelling reasons for directors to opt for a high-end, dedicated camera in favor of a smartphone.
“The gap is definitely closing,” Gerstenberger says, adding, “The quality’s there, and it becomes much more about the story that’s being told and the knowledge and experience of the filmmaker and the team, rather than the camera or the tool.” In other words, we’ll know that smartphone films have reached their most mature form when they aren’t a story at all.
