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Quentin Tarantino is an old soul, and a film purist. He’s a filmmaker, and takes that term literally, believing film should be made on film. He’s widely considered one of the most meticulous filmmakers working today, dedicated to details beyond the detection of the average moviegoer. Filmmaking is an art, and in the eyes of a director like Tarantino, replacing film with digital is akin to a musician replacing a real drum kit with a sound machine. It may seem the same to most, but there’s something lost in manipulating the medium.

“The thing I don’t like about digital projection is it’s just HBO in public,” he told a crowd at Comic-Con.

Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight (2015) continues the filmmaker’s tradition of shooting entirely on real film stock. Cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the film with 70 mm film, using Ultra Panavision 70, capturing an aspect ratio of 2.76:1.

“The promise of 70mm had cinephiles singing Tarantino’s praises. The film stock is essentially twice as wide as standard 35mm stock, allowing for a grander capturing of landscapes and action blocking.” - Kristy Puchko, Cinemablend

Simply put, it’s a very wide format that doesn’t have to be blown up as much to fill a movie screen. This makes the picture look better, and gives the film a grander scale.

70mm is an old film stock, the cost of which led to its decline in popularity decades ago. Well-known films that used the format include South Pacific (1958), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965). In modern filmmaking, a variation of the film stock is used in IMAX productions. The Hateful Eight will be the widest release of a 70mm film since Ron Howard’s Far and Away in 1992. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master was also 70mm, in 2012, but wasn’t as widely released). A few other recent films, such as Interstellar (2014), Gravity (2013), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Jurassic World (2015) had segments of 70mm, but not the entire production.

“Currently in post-[production], The Hateful Eight was lensed on 65mm negative and is believed to be the first production since 1966’s Khartoum to use Ultra Panavision 70 anamorphic lenses. This led to an enormous effort at Panavision, which reworked 19 of these classic lenses for the production in just a few months. (Incidentally, these lenses are expected to next be used for Star Wars Anthology: Rogue Oneby cinematographer Greig Fraser.).” - Carolyn Giardina, Hollywood Reporter

“It’s the same format that was used to shoot Ben Hur (1959), and you can really feel Tarantino’s excitement when he says, “It’s not that they used these same types of lenses on Ben Hur. They used these lenses on Ben Hur. They only made one set of them.”” - Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge

One reason film is going by the wayside is that most modern movie theaters have been fit with digital projectors. This means any movie shot on film needs converted to a digital format before it can be shown. Though this will also be the case with The Hateful Eight, Tarantino is retrofitting over 50 theaters in major cities with vintage amorphic film projectors so they can screen the film in its intended format.

While all these efforts are exceptional, none of them are surprising from Tarantino.