The great thing about a sitcom is that you're in front of a live audience, so you really get in touch with what audience reaction is, but also there are lots of elements of film that you're dealing with, and there's kind of a great boot camp or graduate school mentality to it, because you're going to suck.
I am a creative person and watching a movie is like writing a story. So when I see a movie, I also see the editing, the music, the camera angles, etc.
I learned about making films by going into advertising, making commercials.
I saw 'The Artist.' It's really beautiful and it's all done to the letter with all the silent film techniques. The costumes were amazing and the dog is so good.
I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.
Filmmaking in general is just really where I'm putting all of my energy.
McQueen is an astonishing film maker. He uses really unusual shots and builds incredible dramatic tension.
I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.
I watch a lot of movies, and I tend to be influenced by scenes that intrigue me, that make me want to use the same effects or technique.
I remember being fascinated by the graduated sizes and perspective on the sets [of Star Wars]. And how they put shorter people and kids in the uniforms and placed them in the distance to give the idea that these sets had more depth than they really did.
Growing up in the digital age of filmmaking, I'm as guilty as anyone of overshooting.
Even if I were to try to imitate Kurosawa I know that it's absolutely impossible. That era of film was just something else, including the actors. Everything about that era was on a completely different level.
I do understand sometimes when actors say there's no one to talk to, or you can't react to, there's truth in that, but for me, I've always enjoyed green screen, and blue screen.
For horror movies, color is reassuring because, at least in older films, it adds to the fakey-ness.
Ashok Mehta was the man who brought contrast and lighting back to mainstream Hindi film cinematography.
Working with green screen, you really rely on the director in a way that you don't on different types of films.
Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
I was doing well in TV as a freelance cameraman, but it wasn't the direction I wanted to go in. I directed videos and tried to put something cinematic in every one. Dialogue, action sequences, helicopter, Steadicam.
Lynne Ramsay's 'Ratcatcher' blew me away when it came out. When I started making short films, I would watch that film over and over again, marvelling at how that story visually unfolded.
The history of horror movies goes back a long way... of people trying to convincingly be terrified when looking at a piece of tape on the side of the camera box. I have a whole new respect for it.
The first light-field camera array I saw at Stanford had a bunch of applications, like to do special effects like you see in 'The Matrix,' where you spin the camera around in frozen motion. It took up an entire room.
It doesn't happen every day, but many nights my dreams are like a movie. I don't see normal movement - I see things in very complicated shots. That's why I do remember many of them.
Every film, every fight choreographer, wants to have a different flair, have a different fight technique. So any film I've done that involved weapons has always been fascinating because everyone is different.
I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.
Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.
