Peter Jackson Quotes

There's a subtleness to camera work. You can really create intimate moments on camera, and sometimes that requires a little more precision from an actor because you have to pull people in as opposed to throwing it to them.

The way you present a stunt is tied in to the way you photograph it, so you're hanging out with the cinematographer.

I work primarily for the camera-it's not something I really talk about a lot, but it's part of the way I am as a movie actor. The camera is my girl, as it were.

Screen work always boils down to that moment between the camera and the actor or the actors. It always boils down to that, ultimately. You serve the camera.

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.

I have very strong feelings about dance and how it's shot.

Finding where to put the camera is probably the most important thing you have to learn when you're a young director, and it's something that's a mixture of instinct and technique.

The way I'm used to telling a story is by looking through the viewfinder and being really close to the actors.

I always direct next to the camera and watch my actors, and so you can see the small things that you can't see on the small screen but you can definitely see on the big screen.

When you have great performers and have set your movie in the right direction, it's a beautiful privilege to let the camera watch the action unfold without spoken words.

The power of a close-up can be extraordinary, but you have to have actors who are able to reveal themselves.

When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you're doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.

Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.

I love being so tight on people in close-ups that the veins in their eyes look like the Mississippi River.

The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

As a film director I like to have the actors create their own close-ups. It's an older style of filmmaking.

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

A good actor knows exactly what the camera wants, what the sound wants, where to find the light and how to tell a good through line and journey.

A good filmmaker is someone who can look at a piece and go, "This camera's really going to be a character. I want people to feel like they're being punched."

Nowadays, people shoot digitally and it's all in color, but you press a button and it all goes to black and white. But it's not lit for black and white. So, it's a tricky thing. If you're going do black and white, you better remember to separate things with light, because color ain't gonna be there.

I realized that my camera work could help me in a lot of ways to put the audience in the driver's seat, so to speak, to get them in there with the action, and to get them as close and be as intimate with what was going on on-screen as possible.

In film, a dancer should always be shot from head to toe, because that way you can see the whole body and that is the art of dancing. Nowadays they shoot the nose. Left nostril. Right nostril. Hand. Foot. Bust. Derrière. The film prevents you from determining who is a good dancer and who is not.

I have to have a working knowledge of light, and optics, film emulsions and their properties, and lenses, otherwise I can't create the shoots that are the vocabulary of the films. But it is not necessary for me to be a cameraman, I can hire a cameraman.

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

If a film is very clever and well-written, that's what gives you freedom as a director. Part of the freedom in directing, for me, is that I'm also the camera operator. That's the place where things are less rigid, where I can adjust as I go along.