By Philip Lelyveld

“The glasses make it hard for me to view 3D as a tool, and not that ‘3D’ is what I am coming to see,” said M Night Shyamalan at the Variety 3D Entertainment Summit.  “I’d love to do a movie where 3D is used maybe four times in the course of an entire movie, but that is impossible today because people expect 3D throughout when they put on the glasses.” Right now 3D is not subservient to the story.  I wish it was a tool, he said, but it is a definition of a movie. Its all about “negative space, negative space” (objects in front of the screen).

Putting on 3D glasses changes your expectations.  You may wear glasses in life, but putting on special glasses when you walk into the theatre or living room defines your expectations for the experience.  It isn’t just about wearing glasses; it is how the glasses impact your expectations.

He acknowledged that there are movies where the impact of the 3D effect can be subservient to the story; where 3D matches the tone of the story telling style.  He sighted the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie as one potential example.  Johnny Depp’s performance and the previous storylines were already over the top.  3D could complement, rather than override, the experience in the next Pirate movie.

Also, he noted that 3D may bring back one of the lost arts of filmmaking; blocking.  Historically, filmmakers had to visualize the movie in their heads, and editing was just putting it together.  Now a lot of footage is shot and the movie is worked out in the editing room.  3D causes the filmmaker to start thinking about blocking again; where do people stand and how do they move relative to the camera.  That’s a really healthy thing, M Night said.

He discussed Walter Murch’s concept of incompleteness*.  Black and white movies forced the audience to fill in the color.  The advent of color took that away.  3D takes away even more of the incompleteness.  So now you need more spectacle to counter the audience’s passivity.   To advance his point, he called The Exorcist the greatest sound movie because it has almost no sound in it.  Tubular Bells, its classic music theme, is only in it for 45 seconds, he said.  M Night wants the same latitude with 3D.  But if he used 3D sparingly today the audience would feel cheated.  Maybe there is a subtle version of 3D, mused Mr. Shaymalan, but we may be too early in the rebirth of 3D to experiment with it.

Finally, he postulated that differential pricing for 3D and 2D is influencing, and limiting, how filmmakers and the audience approach 3D.  When every movie was the same price, the ticket buyer never had to put value on their movie decision.  Now he senses that some people are saying ‘I’d like to see that movie, but I’m not sure it is worth the price for 3D.’

*From Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See, by Walter Murch  (http://filmsound.org/murch/stretching.htm)“The danger of present-day cinema is that it can suffocate its subjects by its very ability to represent them: it doesn’t possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, radio drama and black-and-white silent film automatically have simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness — an incompleteness that engages the imagination of the viewer as compensation for what is only evoked by the artist.”