Jennifer Yuh Nelson Quotes

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

My wife Victoria Harwood was art director on 'Far North,' and she had designed my student film, 'The Sheep Thief.'

I'm not a big fan of CGI. I'm not a fan at all, unless they use it in a way that doesn't call attention to itself.

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.

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.

We're pretty insane about art direction.

Imagining things are there that are not really there, with the green screen, is very much like theatre, when you're looking at the fourth wall.

I think as storytelling has changed, you know, it's kind of turned into kind of hyper-reality movies.

I just think action films now have... often, because you can do anything with CGI, people do. And I don't think you necessarily should. You lose that sort of human dimension, and you get all the stuff breaking the laws of physics.

I'm a very creative person, and you know when I hooked up with Benny Boom, I said I want it to be a different kind of video. I want it to be crisp, and I want it to relate, [and] not to be so far over people's heads. And that's when we came up with the p-t-d-d-d-d-d (camera flashes.) You know with the picture changing, and that's it.

I love photography and art-directing is something that I really would enjoy to do.

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise.

The whole point of making a film is to tell a story. That seems to be forgotten. Many films today just rely on special effects and they have an explosion every five minutes. Who needs it? It's rather repetitious.

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.

I think the challenges that come with the responsibility of art directing something is something that appeals to me.

The thing I loved the most about being art director was picking the photographers and working with them.

I got Greg Aronowitz, who does [ Felicia Day] sets, to do mine as well, and he's just amazing. He can work miracles with nothing.

There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

Being on set and seeing all that green screen, and how it activated my imagination, was amazing to me. I fell into that world very easily, and it was incredible to be a part of.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were.

I always think to shoot action scenes is not really about the stunts. It's more about an expression and about imagination.

Film is a truly magical medium. You can create illusions of reality, make people think they've seen things that they really haven't - like blowing a guy's head off with a shotgun.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’