George A. Romero Quotes

You've seen how they make movies like Star Wars and stuff. They're never really there. They're in front of a green screen just pretending to be jumping around.

You can make amazing sci-fi films if you want to with very, very little money and very advanced technology that can run on your desktop.

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

What happened in the early days of Disney is that Walt Disney used all of the new technologies as they came out. When matting came out, they adopted it. They adopted sound and color and xerography. Walt did that. And then, when he died, people began to think that this is just about making films, so they stopped bringing in new technologies.

First of all, in the old days, if you wanted to show someone getting shot on film, all you could do was place an effect in the original take. And if you wanted to brighten somebody's face and leave the rest of the room dark, that was a very expensive process.

Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.

In movies, images cost - if you want a big image, it takes more money.

Going from 'Shark Night' to 'Piranha,' a guy holding a fish on a stick in front of you that they're going to replace in post-production, it's a lot different than seeing this animatronic shark that, if you get caught up in the moment, looks, acts and you sometimes think could be real.

Three years after starting, by physically doing everything from raising the finance to special effects, we'd finally cobbled together our low budget film.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.

Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.

I could take my grandma and put her in a cape, and they'll put her on a green screen, and they'll have stunt doubles come in and do all the action. Anybody can do it. They're relying on stunt doubles and green screen and $200 million budgets - it's all CGI created. To me, it's not authentic.

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.

Acting with a green screen has been physically challenging. I look at the green screen and then I'll look somewhere else and everything looks red. It's a bizarre thing where green has an effect on my vision, but it's fun.

Special effects are becoming more and more affordable and looking more and more like the real thing.

In 'The Greatest Showman,' I'm back doing VFX myself, allowing me to craft exactly how something looks, one frame at a time.

I came in during the era of models, motion control, and optical printers. ILM had just started its own computer graphics division, after the Lucasfilm computer division had been sold off and became Pixar.

It would be great to read a script, which is an action script uniquely written so that it doesn't cost an arm or a leg because we are now accustomed to seeing action in the superhero form.

There's things that you just couldn't do with an optical printer. Now, with digital compositing, most of the energy that goes into a shot goes into the aesthetic issues of, 'Is it a good shot or not?'

Technology is a very important part of cinema.

A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

There's a few things I learned from my experience on 'Hieroglyph.' First of all, I learned that building a world doesn't need to be as expensive as a summer blockbuster. Yeah yeah, newsflash, I know.

[I was filmed] against a blue screen [in the Star Wars]. All the rest came later, in Lucasland. They did have me take gun lessons, though. I went to the same guys who taught Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

Working with a green screen is so different than working with another human.

I have more control of the material if I produce. I can be much more active in choosing the writer, shaping the script, casting and editing the film.