Sean Baker Quotes

Using non-actors has its own rules and really requires that you allow them to do their own thing.

For working with non-professional actors, you have to have this particular desire to work with people who are reluctant to play in a movie. I like this relationship. I'm like a recruiter, an employment agency giving someone employment.

The striking thing about 'New Girl' is that under all the comedy, there's something about the emotions and reactions that feels very real - much more real than other sitcoms. Like - maybe everybody is sort of laid bare in different ways.

My favorite way of making films - and what has allowed me to get key scenes in 'Cartel Land' and 'City of Ghosts' - has been when I've been able to operate alone.

'Devdas' isn't a real film. It isn't in the same genre as Mira Nair's 'Monsoon Wedding,' where the camera's presence is so understated it almost disappears.

The ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.

I think the camera has got to be motivated. You can't have things arrived at gratuitously. Everything has to have an organic function, but the more comfortable I've become and the more imaginative and sophisticated and the more exploratory I've become at the medium, the more I've subtly deviated away from that in various ways.

From so much of this seriously-intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike.

We are not documentarians, we are filmmakers.

It was nice that there [ in the Bourne Ultimatum ] was a reference to the relationship . It's very subtle - it's actually without dialogue. I do think it's powerful even without words.

Whenever I study a genre of film-making, Steve Spielberg is the first guy I go to. Even Catch Me If You Can, which is a very lightweight kind of thing, if you just look at the economy of the way he designs his shots and works around actors, the craft is amazing.

Alejandro Amenábar has a unique way of approaching movies and thinking about something which was new to me. It was different. I have a lot of respect for him so I just took a gamble.

Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways.

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

I am in love with the idea of doing a movie in 3D. I think 3D would be great for the story I want to do, in a realistic, normal story, using 3D on the emotions in a kind of intimate story.

Mark and jay Duplass really like to improvise. Even if we beg them to go back to the script, they invariably ask us to go "off the rails," as they like to call it. It's just the way they work. You get a full written script. And it's really, really, really good, so that's why it's kind of peculiar that they always want you to improvise, because if I wrote something that good, I would want everyone to stick to the dialogue that was written.

Smaller movies are great because you don't have to argue with so many people all the time. But really I like arguing so there's a balance either way.

Well, I'll be honest with you, sometimes you don't know you're playing a moment that's going to be in a montage. Sometimes it's a scene that didn't work out the way you hoped it would be and ends up in a montage.

Most of the films I myself like don't do very well. Every director, he has a choice, whether to go for subtlety and try to articulate every minute detail, or to go for the broad strokes and hope that the people will fill in between the lines. I tend to go for the broader strokes.

It is very difficult to follow your own method all the time because you may crash against some directors who want from you something different. Trying to understand the material, who you're working with, and how can you fit in there. That is my approach.

If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.

I've often said, not totally jokingly, that screenwriting doesn't really qualify as real writing at all. You don't string sentences into paragraphs. You don't maintain a constant breath, or create internal rhythms, or even develop a fully-formed thought. The camera does all that work for you!

Usually, when you do a period movie, you just recreate what you are shooting. You don't recreate the way you shoot it. I think I did the same thing here as I did in the OSS 117 movies. I recreated the way to shoot that period, because to me, like what I was saying about the Steadicam, there's no sense to do a Steadicam shot in the 1920s because you have never seen the '20s like that. You can't believe there was a Steadicam in the 1920s. I believe it's a continuation of the OSS 117 in a way but without the irony.

I'm pretty much a character-driven film director and my movies are smaller. I don't do a lot of coverage. I use lots of master shots.

There was never any down side to casting friends over professionals. It was always fun seeing folks who never performed before stretching their wings.