Film on film about ... film

Mark Raso is a conflicted director. His newest film, Kodachrome, played on big screens at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, but on April 20 the only way Canadians can see it is on Netflix. It’s getting a theatrical release in 10 U.S. cities, but for the rest of the world it’s streaming only.

Even more incongruous is that the fictional film, set in 2010, tells the story of Benjamin Ryder (Ed Harris), a photographer who has just found four old rolls of undeveloped film and needs to get them to the last Kodachrome lab in Kansas before it closes its doors forever. In keeping with the theme, Raso shot the film on — well, actual film.

Reached on his way to the Los Angeles première, Raso is sanguine. “There’s definitely an irony to it,” he says mildly of the Netflix release. “In a perfect world it would be in as many theatres as possible, and more people would be going to the movies in general to choose a movie like this. But I’m not sure that is the reality today.”

On the other hand, he says, Netflix’s 100-millionplus subscriber base is nothing to sneeze at. And he thinks the movie will look just fine on smaller screens, though it may not feel the same. “I feel like it hits emotional highs and lows that people can tap into more in a group environment. But visually, it’ ll be fine.”

Some of those emotional beats come courtesy of Jason Sudeikis as Benjamin’s estranged son, and Elizabeth Olsen as his personal assistant; both accompany him on the road trip to Kansas. It’s a rare dramatic role for Sudeikis, best known from Saturday Night Live and such films as Horrible Bosses.

Raso says the comedy background was never an issue. “The first thing I said was ‘This is not a comedy,’ and he said, ‘Oh yes, I know that.’ Some of the people who played opposite Jason, their first reaction was to try to make everything funny. I had to take them aside and say this was real.”

Kodachrome may have been relegated to digital screenings but Raso has been through this before. His previous film, 2014’s Copenhagen, was shot for a small-screen release and unexpectedly got a theatrical distribution. “Kodachrome’s a little different,” he says. “I definitely made it for the big screen.”

Intent has become a big deal in the Netflix age. When Alex Garland learned that viewers outside the U.S., Canada and China would have to stream his newest film, Annihilation, he was upset. “Some of this film is explicitly designed to be seen on a big screen,” he said, “particularly the last half hour of the film, when dialogue is largely jettisoned in favour of imagery and sound design and music. There’s a lot of hard work by a lot of people that is diminished.”

Even Harris weighed in on the subject. He’s directed two films, 2000’s Pollock and 2008’s Appaloosa. “If you’re shooting on film because of the quality of the image, but they’re going to transfer it to digital anyway in all these theatres, you’re losing it,” he said. “It’s annoying.”

Raso says he “fell in love” with film making Kodachrome, and would love to do it again. “There’s so much more trust in everyone involved in making this film because you can’t see it, you can’t push a button, you can’t delete, you can’t see what you got. There’s not even a lab in Toronto that processes film, so we had to ship it to Montreal.”

That was a little unnerving. “We wouldn’t see what we shot for days. And everyone felt a little bit more in tune with what we were doing because of the preciousness of it, the fact that we knew. This was a 27-day shoot; if something was out of focus, if something wasn’t working, we weren’t coming back to pick it up.”

He may yet have one last chance for people to see Kodachrome projected on film. Plans are afoot for a special screening at the Kodak Center Theater in Rochester, N.Y., still the home of the headquarters for the 130-year-old imaging company Kodak. “So much of that city ran off Kodak,” he says. Timeline for the screening? He sounds hopeful: “Maybe in the spring.”