Barry Levinson Quotes

In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.

I don't get tripped up in technology. I use technology as a tool. 'Oldboy' we shot Two Pro 35mm. For 'Da Blood of Jesus,' we shot digitally. We shot the new Sony F55. It's a 4K camera.

The helicopter was a U.S. Navy helicopter. There were no civilian helicopters available to film companies, so they just made some stuff out of two-by-four wood. And I would straddle a two-by-four out from the helicopter with a camera and what we call a high hat, which is a low metal stand.

A digital camera does have many advantages and I was a believer that digital video would be a big influence on film-making.

Working in 3D I didn't experience much of a difference, except that the cameras are very big so they can't be moved around with as much ease. It was more like, when you've seen photos of cameras from the 1930s being moved around with these huge cranes. So there was something quite sort of old-fashioned about it almost.

My protest against digital has been me saying, "What's going to happen to film?" The result is that Kodak is out of business. That's a national tragedy. We've got to keep making film.

I'd like to use IMAX. The problem with IMAX is that it's a very loud camera. It's a very unreliable camera. Only so much film can be in the camera. You can't really do intimate scenes with it.

All my films are shot on hand-held cameras. These cameras took five years to build and had to be light enough to be carried.

I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand!

Motion-picture studio floors used to be all wooden and not smooth at all. This was difficult when moving a camera around on a dolly.

It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.

I feel a lot of films that are shot digitally, even low-budget independent films, they look super slick now. Because the technology is so good that they look too good.

For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.

Making this movie was a great opportunity for me to explore high-definition. I'm glad I got to see what the challenges are, what makes it better. It works wonderfully.

Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.

We build camera rigs tailored specifically to the story we're trying to tell or the shot we're trying to capture.

In Bosnia, there are no 35mm cameras. There are no film labs.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend shooting a feature film on a still camera.

Go home, pick up your video camera, and make a film.

In "Virginia Woolf" I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera.

I do believe that a film like Ten could never have been made with a 35mm camera. The first part of the film lasts 17 minutes, and by the end of that part, the kid has totally forgotten the camera.

The first movies, they just put up a camera and had a train come into a train station, and everybody was amazed. That was sort of all technology.

When the camera starts to roll, there is something of death about it.

The way I see it, I belong to the film as any other department.

It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.