Sam Levinson Quotes

I love staging action and wide-shots, not necessarily going to close-ups.

So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically.

Visually, I'm always considering shots and composition quite a lot, and I love putting art into films, and I do a lot of the art.

TV helped me understand camera angles, close-ups, master shots.

The job is trying to create movie shots that have depth, that have the meanings you need them to have, and then good enough so that they will add something to the final picture. They will make the picture; they'll get into the picture, and give them what they need. It's an interesting job.

The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.

There are some scenes that work beautifully in a moving, sweeping master, which is how I like to work.

I try to tell my story as simply as possible, with the camera at eye level.

I love it when television is shot in a cinematic way and I think to aspire to that is no bad thing.

A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.

In putting setting to work, I like to think about long shots and close-ups. The long shot is the overall view of the place in which the characters live - the island, the town, the wide sweep of place. Then we narrow in. The close-up, the tight focus, makes the place different from anywhere else.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

The weird thing with 'Kismet' is that Vincente Minnelli didn't know what to do with a Cinemascope camera for that film - so he never moved it! It's like in the old days when sound first came in and was so complicated that the camera just sat there. There are hardly any close-ups in 'Kismet,' so everything's at a bit of a distance.

In a normal movie, the director controls what you look at. The shots don't last very long because you're getting the audience to look at specific things. An IMAX shot, on the other hand, can be twenty or thirty seconds long.

Film gives us the luxury of deciding where the viewpoint of the audience is, and by knowing that, we can very effectively design around what is actually seen on camera.

Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.

When I started, you didn't focus so much on production, certainly not - gosh - down to the finest little detail of how you shifted your eyes or how you turned to somebody. A lot of the shots were far away from a still camera. There weren't as many close-ups and intimacy.

In all my films, I have tried a different look.

I just - I kind of see it that way. I find the higher angles down. I do - look, you can go back to the staircase shots in "Third Man" or the staircase in "La Dolce Vita." So I just find that visual construction in a frame.

A movie that I'm involved with and have a lot of love for, which is 'On The Road,' does use a lot of handheld. It can be done beautifully. I'm proud of that. It's a very beautiful movie.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

I like the way Quentin Tarantino creates a scene using a series of close-ups or showing very cool images of a person or people walking on some ordinary street in slow motion. I wish I could achieve that kind of slow-motion effect in manga, but it's rather difficult to draw; the only things we can play with are tones of black and white.

As a director, you're looking for ways to tell the story with the whole image and not primarily dialogue.

Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique.

What I'm still grappling with and learning how to do is to be looking and thinking cinematically, having come from television.