Hiro Murai Quotes

I'm a big fan of being able to hold those long shots and use space. I don't know, I think everything's so quick cut these days, as if films are too afraid that the audience is going to get bored instead of relaxing and trusting their work.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

The first dolly track was somebody who had the idea to put the camera on a boat on a canal. So the boat would move very slowly but steadily. So they would see all that surrounds you and you'd see the landscape changing slowly. So that was the first time.

I love the idea of thinking of cinema as not that far from music. A lot of my favourite movie makers, the way they move their cameras or the way they cut just feel very musical - even if the movies have no music in them at all.

I used to hate, with a capitol H, making videos. It was nothing but a chore. It was something you had to do to have your music accepted in the visual medium.

I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

The process of filmmaking is very musical, you get into the rhythm and the rhythmics of how someone is, especially with Woody Allen who is very much into body language and body movement.

A montage is incredibly challenging. When I can, I'd like to know what the music is going to be ahead of time because that will affect the beat, the pace of the montage.

On 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' we started exploring shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors, and there are no cuts, and you feel like you're there.

There's two aspects of film crafting that I'm very strict about, and that's how I move my camera and where I cut the film.

The key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes.

I've studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style. I'm a student of Michael Moore's films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.

A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.

I'm very heavily involved in the editorial post-production process, and the camera - it's just such a big part of my storytelling language. I like creating the tension; I like creating the emotion through the movement of my camera, or the lack of movement through my camera, depending on what fits the scene best.

I've always wanted to be a director; it's just how my mind has always worked. If I hear music, I see music videos and all the shots and setups to edit it all together. If I interact with a person, I'm seeing a whole scene come to life.

I've been accused, many times, as a writer/director, of my pace being too leisurely and too long.

It's one of the things I love about my job: it's my job to help a director tell the story, to just be willing to help.

I like pointing the camera at the actors and letting them fight. Don't let the camera do the fighting for you, and don't let the camera give them the adrenaline hit. Let the people in the frame do that.

On film, you really have to focus on what you're looking at. You're imprinting a physical image.

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.

Yeah, I co-directed '23.' Yeah, the whole concept of the video... Even with that video, I feel like it's not a video that you can get sick of. You can always go back and watch that and it's fresh.

I'm not the guy who does slo-mo, or I'm not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that's not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I'm working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.

Somewhere down the line, I felt the need to come to grips with the realistic - or live action - image which seemed to me central to the notion of film. And then a whole new world opened to me.