John Dykstra Quotes

I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don't think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn't there yet.

There's a reason why I use film. It's because it's the best representation of how our eyes work. I really believe that. I think it's better than digital.

Various studios are still shooting on film with digital grain and the DI negatives, it's not ideal. We should really be all film or all digital. But that being said, the old way of graining in the camera, now you can make changes like a painter. It's dangerous because you can ruin the film, you can over-fiddle. We've all seen films and gone 'what the hell is that?'

Digital has obviously changed things a lot, but not all for the better as far as I'm concerned. Of course it's much more convenient and you're getting instant results, but to me it just lacks the finesse of a roll of film and it has a slightly superimposed feel.

I'm not interested in pleasing color; I'm interested in exact color.

I wasn't surprised to find Samsung's OLED screen to be bright, vivid, and clear. It's beautiful, although in viewing some photos and videos, I found, as I have in the past, that - to my eye, at least - Samsung tends to oversaturate colors.

There is a difference between film and digital. Because digital, you know, it's perfect and whatever. But with film, you get depth. You get subject.

The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.

Grain isn't structured like a screen door that you're looking through, but pixels are. Film-based grain is just all over the place, one frame totally different from the next. So your edges are coolly sharp and have a different feeling, an organic feeling rather than this mechanic feeling you get with digital.

It might sound odd, but I want to thank Michael Bay because he's been saying how important it is to show 3D with the right luminescence. And that's very important for this film, a lot of which was shot at night or with very low illumination.

Film has far more color shades. It's called 'bit depth' in digital terms. And most bit depth in digital is about twelve, but film bit depth can be twenty to thirty. And so you just have more shades of yellow and red and oranges and everything.

I'm always secretly the most pleased when a show just really, really looks good and when my camera guys are really happy with the images they got.

One of the problems I have with a lot of movies these days is that everything is too well lit. In the world of digital creations there is a tendency to show too much.

With digital, you do have the advantage of having an absolutely rock steady image because there's no projector gate, no perforations, no film weaving through a machine. And there's no dust and no scratching.

Hopefully with digital projection, a film will always look the way the filmmaker intended.

The glory of 70mm is the sharpness of the image it offers.

I don't get tripped up in technology. I use technology as a tool. 'Oldboy' we shot Two Pro 35mm. For 'Da Blood of Jesus,' we shot digitally. We shot the new Sony F55. It's a 4K camera.

I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.

Filmmakers have to commit to making 3-D films properly like Jim Cameron did and not do cheap conversions at the tail end of the process.

Sometimes I don't know whether a movie has been shot on film or in digital when I watch it in the theatres.

For the last 10 years, I've felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I've never understood why. It's cheaper to work on film, it's far better looking, it's the technology that's been known and understood for a hundred years, and it's extremely reliable.

Some colors are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the color you want on the screen.

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century.

I feel comfortable with either digital or film - the director and the project should determine the course of choice.

When I look at a digitally acquired and projected image, it looks inferior against an original negative anamorphic print or an IMAX one.