Dennis Muren Quotes

Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.

When they invented the Steadicam, every movie had to have a fight in a stairwell. Whenever there's a new thing, it's abused until artists realize what a Steadicam as a tool can be. And now I defy people to be able to see Steadicam shots, because we know how to do them and make them invisible.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

I've been making films since the '70s and trying to develop that best possible fiction-film style that I feel is the most expressive. At a certain point, I felt I was winding up making the same film stylistically and I found that boring.

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

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

We had to get past the mechanical film age to be able to explore other things, but it will be interesting.

I'm working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.

It's funny, people don't think of 'Cloverfield' as being restrained because it's a handycam movie, but the only reason it's a handycam movie is because that was supposed to be the reality of the situation.

As an action director, I always try to bring something fresh and new.

The best director is the one you don't see.

Almost anything can be justified as a style of filmmaking if it works.

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

Video games are the first new artistic medium since television, but they are more different from television than television was from cinema; they are the newest new thing since the arrival of the movies just over a century ago.

When we made 'Toy Story,' journalists were more interested in talking about the technique because it was so new and unknown, and we just wanted to talk about the story.

Raman Raghav' was shot on location, but there are many stylistic things in it. I like this mixture of documentary and extreme stylization.

I know there are people who can direct sitting down away from it all at a video monitor. But I can't do that.

There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater, and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative. Everything feels less rehearsed. It’s more experimental than classical.

It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.

I'm a very creative person, and you know when I hooked up with Benny Boom, I said I want it to be a different kind of video. I want it to be crisp, and I want it to relate, [and] not to be so far over people's heads. And that's when we came up with the p-t-d-d-d-d-d (camera flashes.) You know with the picture changing, and that's it.

If it was up to the studio, everything would be shot with a camcorder.

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer... I often see things after the fact. So there’s a revelatory quality. And this definitely includes a sense of playfulness, because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.

Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

I see things going on before my eyes and I photograph them as they are, without trying to change them. I don't warn people beforehand. That's why I'm a chronicler. I speak about us and I speak about myself.