James Wan Quotes

In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.

When I shoot a film, I take my camera and put it among the characters and let it show you their world, their problems, their happiness and the little things that matter to them.

The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.

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

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.

In my films that I've directed, and my work in commercials and videos, I've rarely used handheld. It's just not something I'm drawn to, but I've seen it done very well.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

We had a script that was really solid and we knew how we were going to shoot and how the energy of it was going to go. So it gave us a lot of freedom to use the camera as a character.

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.

I don't believe in one slow panning-shot to show a place. It should unfurl in the story itself.

Hitchcock loved long convoluted shots that contained a lot of tracking and camera moves.

Stanley Kubrick was brilliant at getting under the audience's skin. He was very interested in the idea of, 'How can I tell this with just a camera?'

I'm older and wiser. So and now having segued into filmmaking I'm looking at [Ridley Scott ] and what he does in an entirely different way and I have respect for what he does and how he composes shots. So that was what was completely fascinating.

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.

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.

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

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

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

As a director, you're looking for ways to tell the story with the whole image and not primarily dialogue.

My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

Guys like Spielberg and Zemeckis and really anybody who is a storyteller-filmmaker today has studied Hitchcock and the way he visually tells a story. He was the master of suspense, certainly, but visually you would get a lot of information from what he would do with the camera and what he would allow you to see as the story was unfolding.

When you shoot a movie, the camera is always taking, taking, taking and not giving anything back.