James Watkins Quotes

First of all, in the old days, if you wanted to show someone getting shot on film, all you could do was place an effect in the original take. And if you wanted to brighten somebody's face and leave the rest of the room dark, that was a very expensive process.

As you can probably tell, I like films and directors that bring a totally unique style to filming action.

The thing with TV and filming is the timing is all faked anyway. You do it so many times, from so many different angles. You never really do it all in one go anyway, so they just fix it all in the edit.

What really helps a guy to become an action hero today is the directing of the movie. All those fast cuts.

I love watching action films, and especially the little moments of wit and humor in the choreography in a lot of them. The editing of an action sequence often has great moments of comic timing.

Action scenes are not that different from other scenes.

I love having 30 shots of every scene.

Probably the most difficult things were my favorite parts. The make-up and the big fight sequence at the end of the movie were very difficult but really fun and challenging.

Every time I hear, Cut. Print, something cold and electrical goes off in my head, because I'm never going to change that film.

Fight scenes are like learning a dance. You learn it move by move, and then you put it all together and it looks awesome when you edit it together. It's great!

I personally think a fight scene is the most cinematic thing you can witness because all the elements of filmmaking come together, you know, with the camera speed changes, editing, make up effects and general smoke and mirrors of trying to make it look like you are hitting someone when you're not. It's filmmaking in it's purest form, I think.

I'm a filmmaker, but my working procedures are different. All my basic structuring is done during the filming. You know, how long I keep the shot, the exposure or the speed - slower or faster, etc. That's structuring. And then there is a second stage of structuring that comes later when I begin to put those pieces together.

I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.

It's hard to incorporate dance into movies I think.

As a second unit director, you're entrusted to shoot the action sequences. On every movie, it's slightly different.

In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.

I'd never really shot action scenes before, but I realized early on that is very much like shooting choreography and dance.

I took one film class at NYU over a summer and learned the basics - you know, how to load a camera and how to light and how to edit - and I became a film editor.

When I first started in the industry, there were - this is prior to the era of computer graphics and all these digital tools - there were some pretty rigid, technologically imposed limitations about how you shoot things, because if you didn't shoot 'em the right way, you couldn't make the shot work.

In making YouTube videos, you can't just be an actor, you have to also know the shots and how to write.

It was in Kanpur where I got exposed to the art of filmmaking.

It is a challenge to direct any film.

The most creative phase of a film is in shooting, because structure is the defining element of that phase.

I'm very impressed by films like' Whiplash' or what Fincher does, where you get all these different... Where you get all this coverage that's perfectly linked up. I actually find coverage very confusing. But I love sequencing shots because I know exactly where I am.

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