Matthew Vaughn Quotes

I was certain when I was about 10 years old that I was going to be a special effects artist or a make-up man. I loved that stuff and pursued it for quite some time, actually.

When I filmed 'Power Rangers,' almost everything was being assisted by a green screen, but it wasn't the same with 'Stranger Things.'

All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.

CGI is done after the film is done. It's through the computer. Most of the film is not computer-generated special effects. Most of it is that creature that is in the room with you.

I grew up loving films and making stupid movies with a good friend of mine, who now actually has a career in a really prominent special effects house, so he's still doing it. We just started messing around with a camera.

When you take something that's inert, and through motion, give it life, make it appear to be alive, living, breathing thinking and having emotions, that's animation. But when you take something that's live-action, and move a part of it, that's a special effect.

It's all about the special effects.

I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.

I want to do more work behind the camera.

I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures.

I liked the whole process of creating on set. It's almost like creating magic. The work that the camera guys are doing at the same time, the lighting... all of the people working in their departments to make one thing.

Everything that is somehow related to direction and filmmaking fascinates me, like cinematography.

I don't think you can beat a costumed monster. It's brilliant. I'll take that over CGI any day.

By 1949 I knew all the studio tricks.

When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to paint myself as, you know, the evangelist for practical effects or some sort of anti CG guy because it's really a tool. Like filmmaking is this toolbox and you use what's appropriate in relation to the story.

I've done a few special effects movies in my life, so I've gotten that out of my system.

The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.

I've never been bothered by proximity to special effects and I've never felt disadvantaged by them. They're all part of a movie, and when the movie's under control I don't feel upstaged by them.

Working with green screen, you really rely on the director in a way that you don't on different types of films.

I like to work in films, but I'd love to work in the technical side of film. I'd love to work with, say, Greg Nicotero [The Walking Dead] in kind of, like, special makeup effects. I'd probably say, "Good with clay and latex." Although I don't know what kind of job that'd get me.

I believe that the physical effect, the physical set, whenever you can, is ten times better than the digital effect.

I feel like the beauty of this age of filmmaking is that there are more tools at your disposal, but it doesn’t mean that any of these new tools are automatically the right tools. And there are a lot of situations where we went very much old school and in fact used CG more to remove things than to add things.

I think coughing up slugs was quite hard. Ron has a scene where he has to cough up these giant slugs. I had this giant slug in my mouth loaded with slime and I spat them out. I think it was plastic. I hope it was plastic.

There was a lot of stuff [in Rock of Ages] that had effects in it and I thought it was too smooth. I thought it would be sexier if it were in-camera cuts. So I did that.