Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You first and foremost need to be honest with the script because you don't want to do anything to screw up the basic fundamentals of the story. You don't want to create anything overly dramatic when you don't need to, and you don't want to create anything less dramatic than necessary, either.
Every single discussion I have with a first AD, or producers, is time of day. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've fought for early-morning calls. The light is 90 percent of our job; we as humans respond to light and where it is at different times of day and not only in positive ways.
A perfect example is 'Zero Dark Thirty.' That's the closest thing to reportage that I've done because a lot of that was shooting from the hip and found images and giving the actors a lot of freedom to explore the space and not have to repeat their actions twice and basically workshop on-camera.
Doing a 'Star Wars' TV show could be prohibitively expensive because 'Star Wars' requires a lot of prop building and a lot of character building, so we wanted to - with ILM's help - be able to make it a financially viable option to solve all the problems that you have with shooting a blue screen environment.
If you go into a studio without a set effectively, you've got a blue screen. As a DP you have to light it of what you think it should look like. You don't have any reference of what the background looks like. You might have some concepts, but effectively you're lighting it as what you think it should look like.
When you're dealing with a shoot day that's costing somebody $300,000; when you're responsible for making that day; when you've got a half-million-dollar stunt that you've got to make sure you cover properly. You don't want to be doing that early in your career. You want to be making your mistakes when not many people are watching.