Rick Baker Quotes

Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it, it can be put on the screen.

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

I went to film school at UT Austin. I learned a lot, and that school's good for puking up all your bad movies early and quick. But ultimately, no one can teach you to be an artist.

I fight to take a good photograph every single time.

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

Truthfully, I don't know how those special effects people do it.

Critics in particular treat CGI as a virus that's infecting film.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

Sometimes good television doesn't depend on money, it depends on imagination and good people directing, casting and doing the job with talented people.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

Every movie presents unusual challenges, and I like solving the problems with a combination of artwork and engineering.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

I take a lot of pride in my photography.

You hear people say that there's too much CG in movies today, but CG is what allows me to take a green-painted wall in a studio and make it disappear, and then put 100 miles of landscape in. CG, in the right hands, can be a marvelous tool.

While it's easy to sit back and cherry pick bad visual effects and blame the industry for making movies the way they are, you're really not seeing the whole picture.

To do a train wreck and make it look real on screen is tremendously skilful.

There are so many tricks and so much eye candy in cinema. What I love about the classicism of genre is that there's a discipline. I think it's a healthy thing to resist all that candy.

I never claimed to be a great photographer.

Sharan is a very talented director, well versed with his craft.

The wonderful thing about cinema is you can bring a 3D world to life.

Real talent is mixing realism with bluff. Every great artist I really respect has a certain amount of bluff; sooner or later you have to be a conjurer, and conjure images.

There are very few things of virtuosity or genius that you can actually witness.

I just think action films now have... often, because you can do anything with CGI, people do. And I don't think you necessarily should. You lose that sort of human dimension, and you get all the stuff breaking the laws of physics.

As a filmmaker, every tool you get to tell the scene better is important.