Phillip Noyce Quotes

I'm always inspired by other filmmakers, whether it's a shot or the way they handle tone.

The way I work with my cinematographer is not based on general principles, but the ideas are triggered by the locations where we shoot.

Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.

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

I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say 'this is where I want to be... I want this look.

Lesson number one: Pay attention to the intrusion of the camera.

We had a script that was really solid and we knew how we were going to shoot and how the energy of it was going to go. So it gave us a lot of freedom to use the camera as a character.

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.

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.

All my film ideas and subjects have come from photography.

A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.

I also know what looks good before the camera, how to move the camera, and how to get a story on the screen.

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.

I've storyboarded for things other people have shot. So thinking in shots and orchestrating shots is not foreign to me at all.

Finding where to put the camera is probably the most important thing you have to learn when you're a young director, and it's something that's a mixture of instinct and technique.

I don't use film in the way that the great auteurs do. I use film, the camera, to record as effectively and as perceptive as I am able what I want to say through the actors.

Film gives us the luxury of deciding where the viewpoint of the audience is, and by knowing that, we can very effectively design around what is actually seen on camera.

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

As a director, I start with the visual.

TV helped me understand camera angles, close-ups, master shots.

When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you're doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.

In the old days, before there was such a thing as film schools, directors learned the camera by watching other directors, and learning from their own dailies, and listening to the cameraman, and seeing what would work. Some of those guys could cut their movies in their head.

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.

It's kind of dangerous to cut in the camera, but that's the only way I know how to direct.

A lot of directors in my experience are very receptive. They see what you do first, and then they want to find a place to put the camera, and they tweak you here and there.