Alfonso Cuaron Quotes

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

On 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' we started exploring shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors, and there are no cuts, and you feel like you're there.

Hitchcock loved long convoluted shots that contained a lot of tracking and camera moves.

If you film a scene in a wide shot, especially a disturbing, distressing moment, I do feel like that helps you feel as though you're the room with these people, instead of cutting it up and getting close - which you wouldn't be doing if you were actually in a room with these people.

There are some scenes that work beautifully in a moving, sweeping master, which is how I like to work.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

We had a script that was really solid and we knew how we were going to shoot and how the energy of it was going to go. So it gave us a lot of freedom to use the camera as a character.

The funny thing is that I almost find it more difficult now to take a still picture than to be behind a moving camera. I'm just so much more inspired and comfortable and confident when I have that whole operation going. I feel more connected. Snapping a moment doesn't seem relevant to me anymore.

In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.

I'm a big fan of being able to hold those long shots and use space. I don't know, I think everything's so quick cut these days, as if films are too afraid that the audience is going to get bored instead of relaxing and trusting their work.

There's a fashion for a macho style of filmmaking. How long can your longest take be? And shooting things in one shot. For me, if you can sort of disappear and make people feel that they are there, that involves massive amounts of work.

If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.

I've storyboarded for things other people have shot. So thinking in shots and orchestrating shots is not foreign to me at all.

Film gives us the luxury of deciding where the viewpoint of the audience is, and by knowing that, we can very effectively design around what is actually seen on camera.

I don't believe in one slow panning-shot to show a place. It should unfurl in the story itself.

I don't write tracking shots in my screenplays or any camera directions, but I do try to give a sense of how the action is moving.

What I like to do with every film is to bring a form, like a cinematographic proposal. If you watch 'S21,' it's a form; 'Duch, Master of the Gates of Hell' is a different proposal.

I was known for a while for doing very long takes, especially after Atonement.

Handheld camera is approximating what we're seeing when we're looking at each other, and kind of looking around, and your eyes whipping around. It adds an immediacy, where you feel like you are watching something through your own eyes, standing there with them. And that just allows you to take more liberties and have more fun with people's behavior.

My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.

If I have to point to something specific with the way I move my camera, I love to do it with a wide lens. I like to show you as much of the space as I can, even if I'm following a character.

Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

I've made some films that were very much image based: 'Anna Karenina' and 'Pan,' for instance.

I've studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style. I'm a student of Michael Moore's films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.

I don't use film in the way that the great auteurs do. I use film, the camera, to record as effectively and as perceptive as I am able what I want to say through the actors.