Pete Docter Quotes

I don’t feel that I’m making movies for iPhones. If someone wants to watch it on an iPhone, I’m not going to stop them, especially if they’re paying for it, but I don’t recommend it. I think it’s dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they’re not visible. I’m trying to make an epic.

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.

If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there's a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

The sets were fantastic. The Harry Potter sets are brilliant. You do get transported for a second.

I've been using the power of the IMAX medium, with its gigantic screens and supervivid pictures, to get people to fall in love with the ocean.

You don't want to be the guy whose back's to the camera in the emotional part of the movie. So, you have to be aware of the camera movement and what the camera's doing.

There'll always be movies that are meant for the big screen, and they should be seen that way.

Experiencing this film in 2-D is only getting about 20 percent of the experience of 'Gravity.'

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.

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

I love 3-D, and for certain movies it can be really great, and for certain movies it can be poison.

A 65-ft.-wide screen and 500 people reacting to the movie, there is nothing like that experience.

I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it's the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television - nothing.

Directing is more what I would like to get into eventually. Frankly, I feel like it would be a waste if I didn't because I've spent so much time on film sets, and I know how they work, and I love them, and I love leading them. I would like to do that as a director definitely.

If you're working on a movie, you want it to be projected on the largest tapestry possible, and the sound to be perfect, and for that kind of communal experience of the movies to take place for it.

I always kind of aim with the action stuff to make it feel like, as an audience member, you're experiencing what the people are experiencing. As soon as you go into slow-mo or repeated edits, shooting it like it's a stunt, it takes it out of that reality. The more real you make that stuff, the more tense it will be.

A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it. It allows you to really appreciate the hand of the filmmaker.

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.

There's a fashion for a macho style of filmmaking. How long can your longest take be? And shooting things in one shot. For me, if you can sort of disappear and make people feel that they are there, that involves massive amounts of work.

There's such an immediate intimacy with film that you just don't get in theater.

Writers would hate me saying this, and I love words, but I have to say that cinema exists, on one level, for the power of the big image and what that image does.

I've always tried to do camera moves that I felt were immersive. So I think, as a filmmaker, my style of filmmaking is very well-suited to 3-D anyway, so it's not like I'm having to change a huge amount of the way I shoot to work in 3-D.

Partly why I love to operate is that I love to watch an actor within a shot. When you watch a shot, and you know that everything's come together, I feel I'm the first person watching it. I always get pleasure out of that.