Antoine Fuqua Quotes

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

Encountering a real place enhances the performances of actors in subtle ways and changes the spiritual texture of the film.

One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

Where film is infinitely superior to any other medium is emotion and story and character.

I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.

Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.

As a filmmaker, you realize that places have character based on their history as much as a face does or an actor does.

New Mexico is the second Hollywood. No, it is, it is. They built all sorts of film studios.

I like shooting locations just because too much control on the stage can be a bad thing.

I used Malta as a location to shoot a lot of my action sequences, and that's because we don't have the kind of setup that Malta Film Studios does. They have a world-class facility.

I don't like to shoot on sets at all. As much as possible, I try to shoot on location.

Listen to the way people talk. If your characters sound real the rest is easy.

The harder part of doing a real story is that there are real people and you have a responsibility to not just go crazy with their lives and have them do things which are not their character, that they then have to live with.

I want a script to affect me in some way. I am usually drawn to character studies, scripts about real people and the world we live in not some fantasy.

When you're making a real documentary, you shoot it and the movie happens. You don't make - this sounds corny - you don't make a documentary, a documentary makes you. It really does.

I certainly don' think I could've played the character [Idi Amin] the same way without being in Uganda. I loved working in Uganda.

I think "honest" sometimes gets used to describe a real depiction of real life. I don't think that's necessarily what we're doing. We created these fake characters and we're just trying to figure out what they would do in situations they enter into.

A character on a page has to feel real, and for me the greatest fun is if you could gender-swap the role.

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood - all the stuff that comes. When you put a sound to something and it's wrong, it's so obvious. When it's right, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's a magical thing that can happen in cinema.

To touch on people's lives [ in a way they ] haven't been touched on before, it´s fascianting. You know, it's one thing if [ a celebrity ] has an incredible character and you're really going to be able to delve into their personality – that's great. But you can never get real purity if people have been spoiled by the camera and don't trust you. I like feeling that I'm able to be a voice for those people who aren't famous, the people that don't have the great opportunities.

When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.

By putting myself out there the way I've been doing people see me as a real person. Even though I do character voices and funny noises the stories are still real and I put them all out there.

I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I'm always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses, how dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what's funny, how to build distinctive and original characters - all the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing.