How Tarantino's 'The Hateful Eight' Brought Back 65mm Panavision History

We've previously discussed how the film utilized the Ultra Panavision 70 technique along with 65mm lenses that haven't been seen in decades. A new BTS video dives even deeper into this history, including the discussion of the return of the roadshow, with select theaters screening in 70mm with exclusive content — the idea here being that the theater should be a different experience than watching at home:

As a quick refresher to go along with the behind the scenes video, here are some of the specs and info on the shoot from our previous post:

• Panavision 65 HR Camera and Panavision Panaflex System 65 Studio
• Panavision APO Panatar Lenses 
• 65mm: Kodak Vision3 200T 5213, Vision3 500T 5219
• Aspect Ratio: 2.75:1

This film is getting a full release in Ultra Panavision 70, which means that we're going to see the first fiction feature film screened in anamorphic 70mm with a single-projector Cinerama system since Khartoum in 1966 (movies like Ben-Hur and Mutiny on the Bounty also used this format). Talk about making some history.

You might remember that the last major Hollywood film to shoot on 65mm and project in 70mm was Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, but while that film shot 5 perf 65mm (2.20:1 native aspect ratio), they center cropped that frame to get to the standard 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and shot a handful of bits on 35mm. The Hateful Eight, on the other hand, is taking that native 2.20:1 aspect ratio and shooting with 1.25x anamorphic lenses, which is later unsqueezed to a super-wide 2.75:1 aspect ratio — much wider than the normal widescreen in cinema today, which is 2.39/2.40:1.

Even if you don't care for all this film stuff, it's pretty cool to see old cinema lenses come back from the dead and get refurbished to use on a major feature. It would be fantastic to see these lenses on more productions, perhaps even on ARRI's new 65mm digital camera.