Quotes About Cinematography

You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

You learn tricks to make action look more dynamic - having the fight come toward you or shooting on a longer lens to compress the speed.

In horror movies today it's lots of fast cut shot and lots of loud noises on the soundtrack. I tried to do the opposite. Playing with silence for instance.

Every film tries to advance the state of the art, at least a little bit. Brand new techniques? A lot of them are just evolutionary: we're just building on something that's like something we've done before and just trying to do it a little bit better or make it a little bit more realistic.

I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done, is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.

I enjoy setting the scene and coming up with interesting frames. 'True Detective' was a very hands-on set.

With 'True Detective,' you have a lot of time. How I like to describe it... it's like you're filming a theater piece.

We were seeing TV becoming increasingly cinematic, with stuff like 'True Detective.' And 'Game of Thrones' opened up 'genre TV' and showed it doesn't have to be cheesy.

When I saw 'Bully' and I was 11 or 12 years old I thought I could do this; I could make movies. Larry Clark's cinematography is very raw. It's also based on a true story. I think a lot of the movies I like are based on true stories.

When shooting in real spaces, the work of a cinematographer begins where location meets production design meets time of day. No movie light will ever look as real as the sun, so scheduling becomes truly paramount to naturalistic lighting.

I'm a big fan of being able to hold those long shots and use space. I don't know, I think everything's so quick cut these days, as if films are too afraid that the audience is going to get bored instead of relaxing and trusting their work.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

I am in love with the idea of doing a movie in 3D. I think 3D would be great for the story I want to do, in a realistic, normal story, using 3D on the emotions in a kind of intimate story.

A good filmmaker is someone who can look at a piece and go, "This camera's really going to be a character. I want people to feel like they're being punched."

When you direct a movie, you're basically looking at a story, the way you want to look at it. You bring that director's vision, and I'm totally open for that.

Everything that is somehow related to direction and filmmaking fascinates me, like cinematography.

Everyday I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as "inspiration" or "having something to tell" and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of narrative , with the painting of texture, with the timrbres and colors of the staging. With the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas

I like figuring out where I need to be mentally so that I'm not thinking about the camera and that it's second nature. I want to get to a place where I can exist within the confines of what you can do with filmmaking and not have to think about it.

What's genius about 'Gravity' is that you are close upon the actors, but 3D works best when you have foreground, middle ground and background.

All these directors who do different locations forget that one room can be shot from a million different angles and a million different ways. When I direct a movie, I'm going to use that.

It's not appropriate to a love story, or - there are a million stories you could think of that don't need 3D. A lot of movies don't even need color!

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

It's just really, really beautiful. Each scene is one long 15 minute take without cutting. My scene is with Robin Wright-Penn so I'm pretty excited about that.

We have got amazing filmmakers in New Zealand with amazing stories to tell, and I want to keep being a part of that.