Emmanuel Lubezki Quotes

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

It was 100 feet of 16 mm black-and-white film of a car coming to a stop sign, and driving off. I had to decide how to frame and light it. It was magic. There was a sense of mystery.

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.

I'm in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

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

You don't want to be the guy whose back's to the camera in the emotional part of the movie. So, you have to be aware of the camera movement and what the camera's doing.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

I like to give dimension to shots inside action scenes. It's demanding because you have to rehearse a lot of things happening at the same time and frame all those things in a shot. But I feel like when you accomplish that then you've got a cool action scene.

There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable.

I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, 'Dial M for Murder,' and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective.

People who are good at film have a relationship with the camera.

I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it's the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television - nothing.

Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.

With moviemaking, the audience always has to keep asking, 'What happens next?' If you have the wrong piece of music over a scene, people aren't going to get the scene. If you have the wrong camera angle, people aren't going to pay attention. That's as much a part of the process as getting people to talk to you.

I don't study films particularly. I plan to direct, but I'm not watching film - I watch the entire film to see how the story goes, but I don't say, 'Oh, so he does a slow pan here, or he pulls here, watch the crane shot, or look at the composition,' because it's got to be my eye.

I always kind of aim with the action stuff to make it feel like, as an audience member, you're experiencing what the people are experiencing. As soon as you go into slow-mo or repeated edits, shooting it like it's a stunt, it takes it out of that reality. The more real you make that stuff, the more tense it will be.

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

Every single director stops at the moment he thinks he has the shot. Sometimes, directors shoot an establishing shot where everything is in the shot. He's going to use this at the beginning and the end.

I also know what looks good before the camera, how to move the camera, and how to get a story on the screen.

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.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

There's a fashion for a macho style of filmmaking. How long can your longest take be? And shooting things in one shot. For me, if you can sort of disappear and make people feel that they are there, that involves massive amounts of work.

With 'Call Me by Your Name,' they locked off the camera and let scenes play out in long, wide shots to make them feel almost voyeuristic.

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.