Miriam Shor Quotes

I rely upon the directors to fill me in before a shot.

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

The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.

I never storyboard. I hate it. I don't understand why so many directors want to make comic strips of their films.

I only make storyboards for action scenes. Once you make a storyboard, you don't film; it can be a stiff move.

To this day I over prepare. I draw storyboards for every scene - chicken scratches so crude that they amuse and horrify the crew. I send out shot lists, act out the scenes, and search for a theme that I can relate to. It's my favorite time of the process.

I would love to direct a western. I love taking photographs and I'm always fascinated with angles. Also, my father was a film editor, and I have a talent for thinking of things that aren't always in a script.

I was always very interested in the storytelling decisions that went into directing. It just held this real allure for me. You know, if we're doing a scene at a dinner table, they weren't all shot the same. 'Why was the camera here for one moment and there for another?'

I don't storyboard like some. I mean, all directors are different. I plan meticulously - really meticulously.

Kabir sir is an extremely planned director. He knows how his film is going to look like and knows exactly what edits are to be made in the film. Thus, it helps the actor a lot when they work with somebody who is so planned.

Shooting on film is great because it imparts discipline: What do you need to see so you're not finding it in the camera. When I'm shooting, I have the scene in mind, where I'm going to have certain lines. I learned to overlap and to shoot more than I think I need. That was the learning curve.

Typically, whenever you're envisioning how you're going to shoot something, you have a location or a set that you're going to build, and it's going to be built to specifications.

Rehearsing is more about blocking in the case of movies, I think, and blocking, of course, is very important to the beauty of a scene.

It was important on The Shipping News to have my house far enough away from each location so I had this time in the morning to think about my shots and still remain open to surprises once I got to the set.

Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.

I don't like to watch playback. But being on the set, watching the way the camera is being moved and the way the light is being used, you do get an idea of it.

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.

You can see all sorts of things in film acting if you know where to look and what to look for. One thing I often notice is that the actor is looking for his mark, the place where he has to stand to be in the right place in the shot.

You don't want to be the guy whose back's to the camera in the emotional part of the movie. So, you have to be aware of the camera movement and what the camera's doing.

If you shoot with a billion cameras, then there's no perspective. You want to use one shot at a time, so it's better to discover what that is before you shoot, rather than trying to make something in the cutting room, and then it just becomes generic.

I'm very interested in directing actors - many directors direct cameras.

I have considered the directing, actually. Not so much the writing. That is not really interesting, but the directing is really interesting to me.

I was very glad later when I was directing that I wasn't in the hands of a cinematographer and hoping that he would do it well. I would know what he was doing, and we could discuss how that scene would look.