Robert Zemeckis Quotes

HBO spends almost a month perfecting an episode. They shoot at the same speed that you would shoot a major motion picture, and they give you all of the things that you need to succeed. They really do support their artists.

It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values - or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.

As a professional, it pains me to watch a movie that is botched and amateurish. I prefer directors who have control of both their craft and their ideas.

Consistency is very important when you're making films.

You know, post-production is a bit of a grind to me. If I'm producing a film, I really... I mean I like editing, but all the other crap, the color mixing and... it's all a grind. And so as a result I cut back producing the number of films I was producing.

Doing a TV show, you're on an assembly line and it's as cut and dry as that. There are some shows that are exceptions. There are producers that want really special things.

We were working with this lousy print and it just wasn't going to be good enough. I said that we should get the original negative and do it from that. Well, a couple guys pointed out that the negative was locked up over at Deluxe.

Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film.

I'll tell you one thing. I've never heard a director saying that the dailies suck.

I just try to make the best film possible, and once the movie's done, we deal with the DVD.

The amount of coordination it takes to shoot a television show is mind-numbing. There are so many things that have to be exactly right to create the correct environment for a single shot, let alone a whole scene or the full episode.

Film is a very expensive medium.

It was somewhere in doing the last season of 'Leverage' that John Rogers and I became confident that we had developed an all-new production technique where we could put more on the screen with very little money. So we started to get more comfortable with the idea of trying to tackle 'The Librarians.'

When you're working on a novel, you never think about how much it would cost to shoot one of your scenes. But that's a huge consideration in film and TV.

I have to say that whatever decisions I make, I really do think that movie making is a director's medium. They are the people that ultimately shape the film, and a director can take great material and turn it into garbage if they are not capable of making a good movie.

The R K banner has had this tradition to make good films, and good films always take a lot of time to complete because of the hassles involved.

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

I have gained a lot of confidence in my process of making films. It does't mean I'll make a successful film or even a good film, but I know how to make my film.

Various studios are still shooting on film with digital grain and the DI negatives, it's not ideal. We should really be all film or all digital. But that being said, the old way of graining in the camera, now you can make changes like a painter. It's dangerous because you can ruin the film, you can over-fiddle. We've all seen films and gone 'what the hell is that?'

I really wish it would only take two hours to make a two-hour movie.

My forte is editing and I am most experienced in that. I love the challenge of playing with material and imagination while editing.

I take time with my films and I want to work on every script properly before I move on to something else.

I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.

I have a shot a lot of movies in Dubai.

No film survives because of a big name. If a film has to survive generations, it will survive on its content and craft.