Filmmaking Technique Quotes

If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

I've never been a fan of directors who clutter a piece with all sorts of crazy preconceptions or weird ideas.

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.

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It's why he found shooting on set boring - because he had already composed the film in his head.

My work is better, maybe all filmmakers are better, for Polanski's imprint on cinema. He created language for all of us to use, there is no question about that.

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

I don't do any editing while we're making the movie. I sit down and watch it all with my editor, we make longhand notes on pads, and then we begin our work.

When I'm actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it's a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying.

In 'The Bourne Identity,' I wanted to give the audience the feeling of being in the car with Jason Bourne, not just watching him drive but be in the car with him, and 'The Wall' is the continuation of that immersive filmmaking style. Where you're trapped behind the wall with Aaron Taylor-Johnson - for better or worse, you're trapped there with him.

Nowadays you don't get to see composition in a movie because nobody ever keeps the camera still long enough to see it. Actors don't have the thrill and the power of working with space.

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

I'm not a big fan of CGI. I'm not a fan at all, unless they use it in a way that doesn't call attention to itself.

The first scene I ever shot for 'Louie Bluie,' on that first day, I had never seen the camera before. I didn't know where to put it. I just knew what was strong about these guys and what I wanted to capture, so I tried to work backward from there and figure it out. Trial and error. Hopefully I got a little bit better at it.

I think every director's different. Every director's got his own style. I mean, when I directed, I basically just screamed for eight hours a day, twelve hours a day.

Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

If I have to point to something specific with the way I move my camera, I love to do it with a wide lens. I like to show you as much of the space as I can, even if I'm following a character.

I was known for a while for doing very long takes, especially after Atonement.

I stopped making videos and commercials for a few months before I started films just to reset my clock because so much narrative filmmaking is a sense of tempo and rhythm.

Charles Laughton, who's a great hero of mine, only ever made one film and it happens to be one of the great films ever, which is 'The Night of the Hunter.' It's full of his kind of imagination and creation and how you do things and just in the way he used the studio, I just thought it was a fantastical way of using the studio.

I realised that there's a more muscular approach to film-making that I found very inspiring.

If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It's an art, not a formula.

[on his use of tracking shots throughout his 50-year career] There's always a certain amount of camera improvisation.

I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.

3D doesn't work quite so well with quick cuts and I probably would have done some longer takes had I really taken that information onboard.