Haskell Wexler Quotes

I think you can say a lot with the movement of your camera but you can also say a lot by keeping it still.

When I started, we had just the camera and the person, mostly. And if you wanted to do a dolly shot, particularly working in Chicago where I began, you'd get in the back trunk of a car, and you'd have a friend drive the car, or you'd get in some kid's little wagon that he plays with and have someone pull that for dolly shots.

A movie that I'm involved with and have a lot of love for, which is 'On The Road,' does use a lot of handheld. It can be done beautifully. I'm proud of that. It's a very beautiful movie.

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.

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

I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say 'this is where I want to be... I want this look.

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.

Woody Allen likes to do a lot of master shots. He likes to get the whole thing in one take, and so you could be going along doing a scene, and then the next to last line, all of a sudden, you stumble, and you have to go back to first base.

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

George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.

I'll reshoot a corridor 13 different ways, and you'll never recognise them.

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

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.

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.

Finding where to put the camera is probably the most important thing you have to learn when you're a young director, and it's something that's a mixture of instinct and technique.

Everything about camera movement, about how film was made, shot architecture, and time management... I was horrible at all that.

If you know how to shoot a scene, then you know how to shoot an action scene. If you've seen an action movie, and you watched it, and you paid attention to how scenes are constructed and where the camera is and how the camera moves, then you know how to do it.

Some directors are interested in acting, and others are only interested in cranes and moving the camera.

It's a very tricky job we have as DPs, where you are expected to make something that really is an emotional art but also needs to be technically spot on. You're often given a very small window of time to achieve it. People sometimes expect it to be even quicker and forget that there's a schedule for a reason.

Laszlo Kovacs was marvelous. He was very much in the same school as Bill Frake, who was, of course, a great cinematographer as well. They had a very similar style and similar sensibility.

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

I remember coming on my first set and it being a playground of things I wanted to ask questions about: cameras and lenses and what the lenses do, what's the focus puller doing and how does that work? Why is there less margin for error when there's less light? I was always asking questions and watching directors closely.

The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.

My work on titles was a marvelous opportunity to learn about filmmaking. I think I touched on just about every aspect of the process, both creative and technical. And I worked with many wonderful people.

The long takes process doesn't allow for that many takes. In the past I have shot over 50 takes of different shots. Sometimes you end up using take 64, sometimes take four.