Ang Lee Quotes

In movies, images cost - if you want a big image, it takes more money.

Ever since 'Star Wars,' there was a rash of how a movie was made. I remember that as a kid. I never really understood how movies were made until that movie, because it was such a technical accomplishment. Since then, you've seen more and more and more, for all different kinds of films, about what goes into the process.

I think that in big-budget movies there's a lot of other stuff going on besides acting, like special effects.

When I played Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings,' if I was climbing up the side of a mountain, which I physically did, you know, I was on every single occasion swimming through streams, all of that, that wasn't captured. That was filmed on 35 millimeter, and for certain of those shots, it was rotoscoped and painted over.

I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit.

There's a level of sophistication of filmmaking that's mind-boggling. Anything you need for your movie, there's an establishment that can make it happen really fast.

When you walk onto a Peter Jackson set, you can see straightaway that money isn't an issue.

That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.

I wouldn't want to do a whole movie with effects.

Comedies are just never that expensive quite frankly. They really aren't. We aren't doing green screen shooting, so even Hangover II in Bangkok might seem like it's expensive, you're flying over and back, but they're just not that expensive to make when you do it the way we do it which is very focused and I've done it before.

Truthfully, I don't know how those special effects people do it.

With 'Tron,' we had so many crew members around and a stage full of special effects people that know exactly what has to be done in the situations. You're on a stage in sets the whole time.

Making movies is about creating illusions, and they can be subtle illusions, but it's all a cumulative effect as you make these little tweaks. It kinda adds up to something, hopefully.

I made 'Super' for $3 million, and that was filmed in 24 days. And that $3 million dollars went to a lot of things other than what shows up on screen. Once you get done with the unions and everything else, that's just, like, the basic cost of what you can make a movie for.

We are able to create incredible set-pieces here in the US that TV shows often don't have the resources to create in the UK.

In 'The Greatest Showman,' I'm back doing VFX myself, allowing me to craft exactly how something looks, one frame at a time.

People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for 'War Horse.' Well, there's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced - but it was definitely challenging at times.

There are a lot of similarities with film and TV, but also a lot of differences, especially in the way they film stuff.

To me the biggest breakthrough was when we did Terminator 2 that just opened the door for Jurassic and all of the others and that was as big as when we did motion control on Star Wars. But I don't see another big thing coming.

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.

Over 55% of all shots using animals in 'The Hobbit' are in fact computer generated; this includes horses, ponies, rabbits, hedgehogs, birds, deer, elk, mice, wild boars and wolves.

We're in a time now where technology is such that we can create anything, and that's what's new about television and film these days.

I went back to film work after Dobie. I went back to film work after Dobie.

For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.

I'm one of the guys who wants to watch the film completely done, with special effects, sound and music, because I tend to get disappointed if I watch it not fully done.