Rachel Morrison Quotes

I think lighting is a reflection of what is at stake emotionally in a movie.

I've heard it said many times, 'Let's work on the look of the film,' but that doesn't work with me.

People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at.

If Caravaggio was a photographer today, I would love to work with him. I love his dark vision - I have a dark vision.

Usually, if you notice good cinematography, then the cinematographer's failing. I try to make light feel like it's always motivated and natural in some way and hope that the lighting goes unnoticed.

A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.

I love being so tight on people in close-ups that the veins in their eyes look like the Mississippi River.

There are movies that change the whole way in which films are made, like Klute, where Gordon Willis’s photography on the film is so textured, and, they said, too dark.

I enjoy photographing. It's always interesting, so I can't say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it's own difficulties.

I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.

I fear that to fall in love with you is to fall from a great and gruesome height.

Glamour really has to do with good lighting, doesn't it?

The close-up says everything, it's then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.

In all my works, light is an important controlling factor.

Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.

On these feature films there are people on the staff who can draw 100 times better then I can, and animate better then I can, and light better then I can, write comedy better then I can. I basically am in the middle of kind of a creative typhoon and I'm just kind of talking the film up on to the screen. Minute to minute, meeting by meeting, day by day.

When you go into extra time, we're talking about drama. But when we reach the penalty shootout, it's a tragedy.

Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.

It [lighting the set up] is quite a process. It's like drawing. It's like being an artist. You pencil it in first, and then you ink it. When you're filming, it's like you're penciling it all in. You know where everything is going to go. But, that application of the final ink takes some time.

There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something. But it's not necessarily right for the film — you jump out, you think about the surface, and you don't stay in there with the characters and the story.

I don't know a single person in life that doesn't have conflict. I don't really enjoy acting enough to not want to experience something that feels like it really affects things. It's like, if you were a surfer, would you want to surf where there was like two-foot waves, or would you want to surf on like ten-foot waves. To me, the more kind of dramatic stories are more exciting for me, to play with.

It’s not a playoff game, it’s like the Super Bowl. … This is going to be a blood bath out there. I know they’re going to be ready to play. This is going to be a physical game. I’m sure that I’m going to be ready and I know my boys are going to be ready to back it up.

I don't know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be.

The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."

To me if there's an achievement to lighting and photography in a film it's because nothing stands out, it all works as a piece. And you feel that these actors are in this situation and the audience is not thrown by a pretty picture or by bad lighting.