Steve Irwin Quotes

I'm 100% proud of the TV work I achieved. The work I did on shows on insects and Great White sharks... stuff that's in school curriculums in England. Now they are showing up on Discovery Channel.

I'm a big fan of David Attenborough, who I think is the most adventurous of the nature program presenters.

The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

I'd really likely to shoot wildlife documentaries. I watched so many of those as a child, and I'm quite into wildlife and love photography as well, so that's something I'd like to do.

I had travelled pretty widely around the world even before then, so I knew where to go to film wildlife.

And shooting things in a documentary style was a good way to create tension and energy without money.

If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.

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.

David Attenborough's 'Life' series is phenomenal. He's a wonderful modern soothsayer.

Raman Raghav' was shot on location, but there are many stylistic things in it. I like this mixture of documentary and extreme stylization.

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

TV helped me understand camera angles, close-ups, master shots.

Documentaries are inherently instinctual; you're constantly moment to moment, determining what the best place for the camera is to tell the story, usually in service of natural lighting.

In my first-ever shot, there was a big shell that was dropped on my belly in slow motion. I even asked the director why we are doing it, and he said it would look beautiful... and I wondered, 'Really? But why and how?'

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

'Planet Earth' was such an extraordinary series and the 'Making Of'... is fascinating: the creatures and stories behind the camera are just as fascinating as those in front. It's a bit of a dream come true to be a part of the team in some small way.

As a child, I remember my own intensive interest in biology, birds, other animals and flowers and was determined at an early age to become a scientist.

I'm one of the few directors that actually shoots a lot in camera.

Generally in my films like 'Hearts of Darkness' or 'Picture This,' I try not to make myself a presence in the film.

You don't need the 'voice of God' commentary. Instead, by juxtaposing contradictory or confirmatory witnesses and archive material, your point of view becomes obvious.

If you're a wildlife filmmaker and you're going out into the field to film animals, especially behavior, it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are, how they work and, you know, a bit about their behaviors.

When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.

When we say 'cinematic', we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir.

That is - the use of the subjective camera is an idea that's been around in movies for a long, long time. And it's an idea that was seized on very notably by Sam Fuller and by Alfred Hitchcock in two different very kind of - otherwise very different styles of filmmaking.

Sometimes, we have to turn our camera to a mirror to shoot something, and people think, 'Oh, that's very stylish.' Yes it is, but at the same time, we did it because we are shooting in a very small space, and that was our only option.