Joe Grant Quotes

Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.

There's an electrical thing about movies.

What really helps a guy to become an action hero today is the directing of the movie. All those fast cuts.

Making movies is about creating illusions, and they can be subtle illusions, but it's all a cumulative effect as you make these little tweaks. It kinda adds up to something, hopefully.

With the kind of money Bollywood directors have, they can at least add drama, gloss and glamour to their films, even if the stories are uninspiring and run-of-the-mill.

In the last ten years of watching films I have found that some of the foreign films I saw affected me most. One American film that stands out for me for its workmanship and artistry is 'Ratatouille.' It was an astonishing effort in filmmaking.

I'd be really interested in making a dramatic, low key 3D film.

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.

One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.

You know a lot of what worked on this was taken from Harry Potter 2, the little Doby character, we had a lot of our skin stuff worked out and that helped a lot. We have a lot of exchange happening.

My brother knows more about film sets than I do, because he works at New York Film Academy.

I'm attracted to directors in general because I appreciate the work and the job they have to do. I watched the post-production, I watched the pre-production... post-production is something that I'm very interested in and I did spend a lot of time in editing rooms when I was young pretending to be sick.

I always loved experimenting in film.

On Fantastic Mr. Fox, I got used to working with animated storyboards as a way of planning for the shoot. We did a lot of sequences that way with this movie. Partly as a result of that, I decided to build more sets in order to do certain shots.

Filming is like a house, you have to feel comfortable in it.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

It is my passion to direct movies.

I think the biggest difference is in live action, you show up, and there's a set there and a ground to stand on, at least, and in animation, there's kinda nothing. You are making decisions on everything.

I love design-based stuff. I dug it in 'Pleasantville' and dug it in 'Seabiscuit.'

And then we watched an amazing number of movies from the late '60s and '70s, which is my favorite time, and we studied their camera movements, their stocks, the way they lit stuff, the colors they used.

Working in films, there are hundreds of odd moments.

When I was an actor in some movies a long time ago, I was so curious about all the camera movements - why is the camera placed here, and why does it move like this? And why the set and the background, the color? It's a lot of questions for me to ask, because I was so interested, not only in acting, but also the whole process of filmmaking.

My wife Victoria Harwood was art director on 'Far North,' and she had designed my student film, 'The Sheep Thief.'

Filmmaking is a very complex form - ya know, acting, lighting, screenwriting, storytelling, music, editing - all these things have to come together.

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