Colin O'Donoghue Quotes

It's funny, people don't think of 'Cloverfield' as being restrained because it's a handycam movie, but the only reason it's a handycam movie is because that was supposed to be the reality of the situation.

Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.

There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

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.

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, 'Dial M for Murder,' and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective.

I studied Hitchcock a little bit at University and knew the famous story about the Birds - that he'd tortured Tippi for a day using real birds. I had no idea that it was a five-day onslaught and that it was the tip of an iceberg that carried on through to another film.

'The Exorcist' is amazing because it recognizes that silences can be as powerful as sound effects.

Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what's going on, the movie should work.

You can do really slow movements with it, like zooming in for a minute and a half. The audience isn't aware that the camera has moved, but there's subconscious tension there.

We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you're going to find in terms of craft. You can't scare people if they see the seams.

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

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

Every single director stops at the moment he thinks he has the shot. Sometimes, directors shoot an establishing shot where everything is in the shot. He's going to use this at the beginning and the end.

I don't like it when a movie becomes a series of 'tour de force' shots, and in a way, I was disappointed that with 'Children of Men,' people noticed that the car scene was one shot with no cuts. If people notice that, it's like they're noticing my trick, you know what I mean? I'm doing it so people will get immersed in the movie, not to show off.

I think, as directors, they may recognize, more than the rest of the body of filmmakers, exactly what you do as a director, because I think sometimes the conception is if the camera isn't swinging around, and it's not pyrotechnic or worthily melodramatic, then the direction is uninvolved.

With 'The Conjuring,' I really wanted to create classical cinema-style film-making, pure cinema as it were.

The core to what makes Fincher really interesting - all the technique and all that, that is not in the center even if it's a big big part - what is in the center is the characters, and he really is interested in that.

I guess the way I shoot things is slightly influenced by the way videogames are cut and shot.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world.

Half of 'Mudbound' were shots I stole in between other scenes.

What makes a lot of suspenseful films work is very, very particular points of view and very subjective use of the camera.