John Knoll Quotes

Well, the Empire State was about 40' high in the studio. King Kong was a little model about 2' high, and the scenery that he worked in was in proportion to his size.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

When I used to work in special effects at the model shop, I couldn't imagine having a better job. We made spaceships and miniature cities and I was working on robots. Then the 'MythBusters' opportunity came along.

I prefer working behind the camera.

I think some of the special effects in Close Encounters hold up better than the new more expensive special effects is because they were better actually.

Well, getting behind the camera is something I've always wanted to get involved with. Ever since I was doing movies like 'Zathura' I was very interested in all the different jobs on set and kind of soaking all the information up like a sponge.

I like doing as many special effects in camera, as much as possible.

I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

I'm one of the few directors that actually shoots a lot in camera.

When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the 'Star Wars' movies as a model-maker, it felt like dying and going to heaven.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.

I want to do more work behind the camera.

I always thought that I would work behind the camera, because it's a more comfortable place for me to be, really.

In Europe and America, you never see a director pick up a camera. They all sit behind monitors.

I think a lot of times, in a lot of modern-day movies, a lot of things are CGI, but so much of the stuff in 'Star Wars' is built and created by these artists.

Andy was not a director and not a writer. He operated the camera a little bit, and he wasn't even so good at that.

Historically, for a stop-motion film, you gathered the crew together, you made the movie, and then everyone ran screaming to the next project.

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

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.

Both Adam and I come from a practical effects background.

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.

That one [in "2012"] was different because it was all CG, getting washed away by water. In "Independence Day," everything was still done in models, built in a certain scale out of plaster, and packing tons and tons of little explosives and charges in there. We had a second one in case it didn't work the first time, but it worked the first time.

I grew up as a little 4- and 5-year-old kid, watching Phil Tippett and my dad make monsters in our garage. That's what I did, as a child.

I never really understood how movies were made, because it was such a technical accomplishment.

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