Kaui Hart Hemmings Quotes

Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

Every shot is unique, even if it's just a close-up, an insert of your hand. You've got to work with the guy behind the lens to get it right, focus in. Those are critical little nothing things, but you've got to work with the people who are trying to put it down, in order to get it.

As the years go by and I make more films, I am increasingly interested in capturing place as a vivid backdrop for my films.

For me, there's far too many close-ups in film. They're a television technique.

The job is trying to create movie shots that have depth, that have the meanings you need them to have, and then good enough so that they will add something to the final picture. They will make the picture; they'll get into the picture, and give them what they need. It's an interesting job.

Whenever I arrive on a real location, I have to move around and work out what the best angles are going to be. When I was moving around with the lens, I discovered things that the naked eye would not have.

The way I work with my cinematographer is not based on general principles, but the ideas are triggered by the locations where we shoot.

The camera must point at the exact spot the audience wishes to look at any given moment. To find that spot is absurdly easy: you only have to remember where you were looking at the time the scene was made.

I love staging action and wide-shots, not necessarily going to close-ups.

Directing is very close to choreography; you deal with space, time, emotions, lighting, making beautiful images.

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

As a filmmaker, you realize that places have character based on their history as much as a face does or an actor does.

Cinematography is so much about instinct and intuition - you want the same range of experience going into behind the camera as what you see in front of it. Your life experience will come through the lens.

Visually, I'm always considering shots and composition quite a lot, and I love putting art into films, and I do a lot of the art.

I really enjoy blocking and staging. I think most of visual storytelling is camera placement and how to stage action around the camera.

For a cinematographer, every frame has to be important.

My whole approach is very much about using the locations as a world, trying to find the beauty in the time of day we shoot or the ugliness of it, in cases.

The process of shooting - of choosing shots - is intuitive for me, and I just feel my way towards what seems right.

Raft told me how to walk with him in a scene: We'd start off in a long shot normal, and about the time we got together in a close-up, I'd be bending my knees so I'd be shorter.

I don't mind being in studios, and I don't mind being out in nature. They're two different ways of making movies.

Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image.

If I have to point to something specific with the way I move my camera, I love to do it with a wide lens. I like to show you as much of the space as I can, even if I'm following a character.

Tak Fujimoto and I, when we started getting enough of a budget where we could afford the right lenses - 'cause we started out doing low-budget pictures together - we started experimenting with this subjective camera thing. And we kind of fell in love with the idea of using that as our close-up.

I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously.

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.