Film Preservationist Nicolas Winding Refn Says "Digital Is So Much Better"

The great celluloid vs. digital debate continues, and if you haven't seen it, you should definitely watch the Keanu Reeves-hosted doc "Side By Side" for an in depth look at the issue. On one side, you have early digital adopters like David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh. Then you have the purists like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, who have worked to salvage Kodak film stock and with the latter going one step further and vowing to take out DCP projectors out of his New Beverly theater. Paul Thomas Anderson is another filmmaker hell-bent on shooting on film stock as well.

But then there's Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of "Drive" who straddles both camps. A cineaste who recently joined PTA as a member of the The American Genre Film Archive advisory board, Refn is quite happy to shoot digitally. Filmmakers are usually divided on the subject, but Refn has a refreshingly non-purist view, one that values the past but also has...