Michel Hazanavicius Quotes

The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.

I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.

I love it when television is shot in a cinematic way and I think to aspire to that is no bad thing.

What I am really curious about is the visuals of cinema... the form.

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.

Visually, I'm always considering shots and composition quite a lot, and I love putting art into films, and I do a lot of the art.

For me, there's far too many close-ups in film. They're a television technique.

I just - I kind of see it that way. I find the higher angles down. I do - look, you can go back to the staircase shots in "Third Man" or the staircase in "La Dolce Vita." So I just find that visual construction in a frame.

Film is definitely a director's medium. They're responsible for the look and everything, and you're a part of that process as an actor, and you try to contribute to the story. But I think it might sound a little pretentious for me to say I think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative person.

I was glamorous because of magicians like George Folsey, James Wong Howe, Oliver Marsh, Ray June, and all those other great cinematographers. I trusted those men and the other experts who made us beautiful. The rest of it I didn't give a damn about. I didn't fuss about my clothes, my lighting, or anything else, but, believe me, some of them did.

You usually get one or the other, you get someone who knows how to tell a story but they don't necessarily know about light and camera and rhythm, or you get someone who can make beautiful images but they can't necessarily tell a great story. He does both and I think he's going to be one of the film-makers that our time is remembered for.

I learned very quickly that the hard thing in life is to make good films. Technically, filmmaking is the camera and the actor telling the story and that's what I'm more interested in doing.

Stanley Kubrick was very selective when he went into a close-up. Every director has his taste in a performance, but Stanley would explore a scene to find what was most interesting for him.

I love writing, directing and photography; if I could figure out a way to put the three things together, that's what I would love to do.

I think that era of mechanically figuring out of how to bring a particular evocative image to the screen was a really important part of my education.

I can't do the movies like I do painting because I am really more of a sort of dilettante or something. I mean I know guys that make movies that I can see it is absolutely their medium and they can just go from one movie right into the next because it is just - they have got it so much on the tips of their fingers. But for me it is a special effort.

I just want to make good movies. Honestly, the only difference for me with this stuff is that there is more people on the set.

I joke around sometimes and say that the DP [director of photography] is like a shrink for the director, but there's some truth in there.

Don't get me wrong, Carter Smith is an insanely talented photographer, but as a director he approached it more from a story standpoint. He definitely had an interest in communicating the text and the characters first, and he allowed his cinematographer Darren Lew to really find the visuals - of course, he worked with him throughout the entire Jamie Marks Is Dead movie, it was a collaborative effort. While the movie is very visually beautiful, in my opinion, very visually striking, Carter was definitely approaching it from a performance standpoint first.

I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.

To me if there's an achievement to lighting and photography in a film it's because nothing stands out, it all works as a piece. And you feel that these actors are in this situation and the audience is not thrown by a pretty picture or by bad lighting.

When you decide you want to make a film, you start listening to everything that anyone has to say about filmmaking and reading everything, and there's a maxim about film being a visual medium, and so you need to make, in a sense, a silent movie and layer on dialogue.

Filmmaking in general is just really where I'm putting all of my energy.

I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.

As a filmmaker, I love the medium. I have a great affection for it and I've been lucky enough to do all different kinds of films. The greatest part of the success I've had comes from horror. I love the idea of mixing humor and horror and to me, it's all a giggle.