Cary Fukunaga Quotes

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.

For 'Chungking Express,' the way we shot the film was all handheld and with all this existing light, and that became very popular. Everybody thought it was cool.

But steady-cams are very different than hand-helds, because hand-held gives you that verite feel.

The reason I like tracking shots has to do more with a sense of real time than anything else. In 'Gravity,' the use of tracking - of long extended takes - was partially because we wanted to film it like an IMAX-style Discovery Channel documentary. You don't have the luxury of cuts when you're in space. The camera is there; you're just observing.

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

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.

I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.

I don't study films particularly. I plan to direct, but I'm not watching film - I watch the entire film to see how the story goes, but I don't say, 'Oh, so he does a slow pan here, or he pulls here, watch the crane shot, or look at the composition,' because it's got to be my eye.

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.

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 two aspects of film crafting that I'm very strict about, and that's how I move my camera and where I cut the film.

I wanted 'Night of the Living Dead' to look naturalistic, but we weren't able to do it because we were shooting with a blimped 35mm camera, which is automatically static.

We shot 'Breaking Bad' on film; we capture 'Better Call Saul' digitally. In the shooting of 'Breaking Bad,' we would have this steady, handheld, cinema verite sort of look, so we purposely went the opposite way with 'Better Call Saul' - locked in the cameras and made the movements smoother and more mechanical.

Honestly, if I could shoot everything in 1:33, I would.

Laszlo Kovacs was marvelous. He was very much in the same school as Bill Frake, who was, of course, a great cinematographer as well. They had a very similar style and similar sensibility.

I don't like to shoot on sets at all. As much as possible, I try to shoot on location.

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

Handheld camera is approximating what we're seeing when we're looking at each other, and kind of looking around, and your eyes whipping around. It adds an immediacy, where you feel like you are watching something through your own eyes, standing there with them. And that just allows you to take more liberties and have more fun with people's behavior.

The way I'm used to telling a story is by looking through the viewfinder and being really close to the actors.

I like to make films with characters that resemble real people, about societies that exist.

I'm not a big fan of shooting something that looks like it could belong in any movie. I'm not a fan of, okay, 'wide shot, wide shot, medium shot, close-up, close-up - we'll figure it out in post.' I hate that.

Visually, I want to try everything. But I believe that every shot of my films really expresses what I think about the story and the character. The most important thing is the story, not the images.

Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.

The pursuit system is an ideal way to shoot action sequences. It enhances the picturisation and captures the scene so well that the audience can feel the thrilling speed of the chase sequence in the film. 'Dhoom 3' is the first Hindi film to use this technique.

I do like being in front of the camera more and more. Having experience behind it has taught me about lighting and angles, how to move, and what looks good and what doesn't.