David Lowery Quotes

Oh yeah - I watched Knife in the Water, saw the shot, and repeated it. But even if I hadn't seen that film, inevitably the camera would've ended up on top of that mast, I mean if you think of it there are only so many dynamic shots on a boat.

In a normal movie, the director controls what you look at. The shots don't last very long because you're getting the audience to look at specific things. An IMAX shot, on the other hand, can be twenty or thirty seconds long.

I'm very impressed by films like' Whiplash' or what Fincher does, where you get all these different... Where you get all this coverage that's perfectly linked up. I actually find coverage very confusing. But I love sequencing shots because I know exactly where I am.

In the old days, before there was such a thing as film schools, directors learned the camera by watching other directors, and learning from their own dailies, and listening to the cameraman, and seeing what would work. Some of those guys could cut their movies in their head.

Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner.

I like the way Quentin Tarantino creates a scene using a series of close-ups or showing very cool images of a person or people walking on some ordinary street in slow motion. I wish I could achieve that kind of slow-motion effect in manga, but it's rather difficult to draw; the only things we can play with are tones of black and white.

I always loved Japanese movies. And they had an enormous impact in France - the Nouvelle Vague took so much from them. It taught us how the camera was placed in the centre of the action.

What I'm still grappling with and learning how to do is to be looking and thinking cinematically, having come from television.

So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically.

I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say 'this is where I want to be... I want this look.

I learned a lot about how to shoot and how to put together sequences.

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.

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.

Lesson number one: Pay attention to the intrusion of the camera.

The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.

I love staging action and wide-shots, not necessarily going to close-ups.

I love it when television is shot in a cinematic way and I think to aspire to that is no bad thing.

All my film ideas and subjects have come from photography.

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

You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.

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.

I also know what looks good before the camera, how to move the camera, and how to get a story on the screen.

I feel every shot, every camera move, every frame, and the way you frame something and the choice of lens, I see all those things are really important on every shot.

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.

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.