Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Your whole life informs your eye.
I loved movies ever since I was a kid.
I am not a fan of having too much gear.
I do think observing is important in learning.
People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.
I don't approach films purely in context of genre.
I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.
When I left art college, I was a still photographer for a year.
I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.
What's seemingly a simple thing can actually be the hardest to achieve.
I don't study any films. I'll watch them, but I don't study anyone else.
I couldn't imagine 'True Grit' in 3D. I think the idea is sort of absurd.
If reviewers don't mention your work, it's probably better than if they do.
I am concerned that the subtlety is being lost and every film tends to look very contrasty and saturated.
My time in documentaries was very educating, in terms of life experience as well as the filmmaking side of it.
I think of filmmaking as a form of communication. Maybe it's also an art, but that's for somebody else to decide.
I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.
Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.
I don't do that virtual reality stuff. I'm not even into 3D, actually... I've been offered it. I just don't want to.
I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.
If I bring anything to the Coen Brothers' films, it's my ability to change tack and create a different mood from film to film.
There's so many films from around the world, I emphasize, that are so beautifully photographed, but they don't get the recognition.
Every shot I have ever made has been a compromise in some way. No image has ever been as good as the one I envisioned in my mind's eye.
I shot film with the Coen brothers on 'Hail, Caesar!' That's fine. I'm sentimental about film; I've shot film for forty years or something.
I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense.
I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn't want to be a builder. So I went to art college, and it just gradually happened.
I want a script to affect me in some way. I am usually drawn to character studies, scripts about real people and the world we live in not some fantasy.
I like simplicity. I like using natural sources. I like images to look natural - as though somebody sitting in a room by a lamp is being lit by that lamp.
Every scene is a challenge. There are technical challenges, but often it's the simplest challenge where you feel a sense of achievement when you pull it off.
Some of the smallest things on a smaller film, to me, are greater achievements than on a big film when you have the resources and the time and everything else.
My dad was a builder, so I didn't have any connection to the arts at all. I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn't want to be a builder.
I've always been a fan of Westerns, but my favorite kind of Westerns mostly were Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, and they mainly took place in the West that was changing.
I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.
The balance of the frame - the way an actor is relating to the space in the frame - is the most important factor in helping the audience feel what the character is thinking.
The biggest challenge of any cinematographer is making the imagery fit together of a piece: that the whole film has a unity to it, and actually, that a shot doesn't stand out.
Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.
I came up, I suppose, a fairly traditional way. I went to art college. I always wanted to be a stills photographer, really, when I was younger, and I briefly worked as a stills photographer.
I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.
Am I nostalgic for film? … I mean, it’s had a good run, hasn’t it? You know, I’m not nostalgic for a technology. I’m nostalgic for the kind of films that used to be made that aren’t being made now.
Some of what I consider my best work, and some of the best films that I've ever worked on, kind of disappear without a trace. There's no accounting for it. Something connects, or something doesn't.
There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot. Or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something.
I think that lens flares can work really well under certain circumstances. Personally, I am trying to get rid of them most of the time. I don't like artifacts that draw attention to the surface of the image.
I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me.
All I’ve ever wanted to do is take stills of people, or take documentaries about people, and try to express to an audience how somebody lives next door. You know what I mean? Just how similar we all are as individuals.
There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but thats much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.
There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but that's much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.
Partly why I love to operate is that I love to watch an actor within a shot. When you watch a shot, and you know that everything's come together, I feel I'm the first person watching it. I always get pleasure out of that.
I do miss the idea of the crew getting together to watch dailies after work. I will usually get selected dailies printed on film especially for the early part of a shoot as HD dailies really don't tell me much photographically.
I'd done a big movie that I wasn't happy with, and I was moving out of London when I got approached about Barton Fink, because my agent said the brothers were in London. We hit it off immediately, and suddenly I found myself on the way to America!
When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.