Christopher Nolan makes film preservation plea

Christopher Nolan's films include Interstellar, Batman Begins and Inception

Film-maker Christopher Nolan has made a plea to preserve the film medium in the face of digital domination.

Speaking in Los Angeles, the director of Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy said: "We need projectors and film prints - forever."

North American cinemas have almost entirely moved to digital. Yet Nolan argued film print "can be a selling point for a theatre".

"We want to see a world where there's a choice," he went on.

"It's important to preserve it for future generations," he said, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Interstellar won this year's Oscar for visual effects

Visual artist and former Turner Prize nominee Tacita Dean was another of the panellists at Sunday's event at the Getty Research Institute, where she also made the case for preserving film stock.

"Art institutions should project a piece of art so that it can be seen in the medium that it was made," she said. "We have to persuade some institutions."

A deal was made with Kodak - the last remaining maker of motion picture film - to keep film alive in February. But Nolan said that more should be done.

"We don't have a uniform standard for preservation and archiving for the studios, at the Academy, or at archival institutions," he warned.

"There's no stable digital archiving medium, [at least not] in the immediate future. If there is, it would need to be tested for decades."

Nolan said his latest release, space exploration drama Interstellar, "did incredibly well" in cinemas that showed the movie on film.