Chuck Jones Quotes

In a normal movie, the director controls what you look at. The shots don't last very long because you're getting the audience to look at specific things. An IMAX shot, on the other hand, can be twenty or thirty seconds long.

The close-up says everything, it's then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.

Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner.

I always loved Japanese movies. And they had an enormous impact in France - the Nouvelle Vague took so much from them. It taught us how the camera was placed in the centre of the action.

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.

In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture.

The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.

There's two aspects of film crafting that I'm very strict about, and that's how I move my camera and where I cut the film.

It's hard to tell writers, especially in movies, that words are secondary. Behavior is important.

I'm very impressed by films like' Whiplash' or what Fincher does, where you get all these different... Where you get all this coverage that's perfectly linked up. I actually find coverage very confusing. But I love sequencing shots because I know exactly where I am.

My favorite films left the camera rest, and the actors and characters have a stage to act. Move the camera when it's motivating.

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.

Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.

There's a rhythm to the words combined with the pictures [in a comic]. Whenever I'm working on a comic strip I re-read it, probably hundreds of times through to pay attention to how all of those things work. Sometimes even changing the angle of a character's eyebrow can really, seriously alter the effect and overall interpretation of a scene. And the insertion of a pause or a cough or a sniff, and all these things that we do in conversation, can bring it to life in a strange way.

I love being so tight on people in close-ups that the veins in their eyes look like the Mississippi River.

The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

What I like in pictures whether by an old director or a young director is when I have the feeling he or she is really using the capacity of film.

So much emotion can be brought in an animated film that's very hard to get in a live-action film. I haven't quite put my finger on why, but it might be because the characters can make facial expression that, if you made them in a movie, they'd call them corny.

I always wanted to do a movie, because I love the movies. They give you a chance to have an intimacy with your audience that is different from stand up. With movies, you can bring the audience in with a close up, and emote in a different way.

A good filmmaker is someone who can look at a piece and go, "This camera's really going to be a character. I want people to feel like they're being punched."

The close-up says everything.

Sometimes there are people who don't know how to make action movies - and that situation isn't a good one.

When you decide you want to make a film, you start listening to everything that anyone has to say about filmmaking and reading everything, and there's a maxim about film being a visual medium, and so you need to make, in a sense, a silent movie and layer on dialogue.

Jack Cardiff - the greatest cameraman who ever worked in colour - was a lab boy to start with so he knew Technicolor from the inside out.

One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.