Michael Gracey Quotes

That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.

I spent four months in Prague in these blue rooms reacting to nothing and you basically place your faith in the hands of the director and the special effects co-coordinator and you keep your fingers crossed and hope that the creatures look really scary.

There's nothing worse than a dream sequence done all in post-production.

Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.

I was just like, "I want to make a decent 2-D movie." I was so worried that, instead of being a decent 2-D movie, it would have been a bad 3-D one.

I directed a movie and now, I'm going to do the editing.

First of all, in the old days, if you wanted to show someone getting shot on film, all you could do was place an effect in the original take. And if you wanted to brighten somebody's face and leave the rest of the room dark, that was a very expensive process.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

There are many applications for which film is going to be better, for a very long time.

CGI is done after the film is done. It's through the computer. Most of the film is not computer-generated special effects. Most of it is that creature that is in the room with you.

Every time I hear, Cut. Print, something cold and electrical goes off in my head, because I'm never going to change that film.

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.

When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.

You've seen how they make movies like Star Wars and stuff. They're never really there. They're in front of a green screen just pretending to be jumping around.

I loved being behind the scenes and finding out how they make movies.

I wouldn't want to do a whole movie with effects.

'Dark Knight' shot in London and Chicago, and we were on that for so long.

I like working on big budget films.

Truthfully, I don't know how those special effects people do it.

With 'Tron,' we had so many crew members around and a stage full of special effects people that know exactly what has to be done in the situations. You're on a stage in sets the whole time.

Technically, the green screen acting can be difficult because there's something worse than a tennis ball on the end of a stick; it's an Australian visual effects assistant running around a field with a cardboard dinosaur head on the end of a stick while wearing sandals.

When you're making a bigger movie, you have much bigger set pieces that require more time and more effort and more people.

I'd really like to do a movie, either as a producer or director. My ultimate fantasy would be to direct a movie and produce the entire soundtrack. I don't really see myself acting.

We're always striving to make Avatar look like a cinematic, live-action movie.

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.