I'm basically a fairly traditional filmmaker.
I'm an advocate of all mediums - it's a larger canvas for us as artists - but we have to keep in mind that celluloid film is what created this wonderful art form, and we have to keep it alive.
When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.
When you are shooting traditional motion capture, it's a big footprint on set. There are, like, 16 cameras that are needed and constraints over the lighting.
I'd been working on more traditional movie sets and TV shows at Universal. All of a sudden, here we're on location in Animal House, and it's down and dirty and quick. It was the way the new commercial world was shooting; the way the indie world was shooting. These were lighter, faster cameras. It was a generational change.
One of the things about working for an old school studio like Warner Bros. is that there is an institutional culture and institutional memory, in terms of production design, camera work, and directors who understand how to do this kind of thing.
With 'The Conjuring,' I really wanted to create classical cinema-style film-making, pure cinema as it were.
I have nothing against these big CGI movies, but there are not enough of the other ones - the ones with stories about character that have a beginning, a middle and an end. I said that to a couple of studio heads and they said, 'That's novel.'
I think of myself as a meat-and-potatoes kind of director.
I came in on the tail end of the old school of Hollywood.
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.
An effective found footage movie is much harder to make than an effective traditionally shot movie. A crappy one is much easier to make because you take your camera, and you shoot the scene, and you're done. But to make it effective, they're actually much trickier.
Film has lost something in the translation to high tech. It's become so super-real. It's with digital this and stereo that, and everything's like a CD.
My theory is that there's a knee-jerk reaction against technology in movie making.
When I was coming onto 'Thrones,' I was looking for, 'What's the formula here?' There was a very David Lean kind of approach to it. It was traditional, in a way, and it was naturalistic in some respects, even though it was fantasy.
Films made in the spirit of the past continued to be made.
'Birdman' has kinda... changed things. I'm not saying you won't see traditionally made movies any more. But I've had meetings with directors, and they've said it makes them rethink everything. You can hate this movie, but you have to talk about it. It's going to go down as one of the most interesting movies ever made.
I wanted to make '13 Assassins' in the old manner, to use old techniques and not to rely on modern-day ones such as CGI, or editing that changes the speed.
One thing I try to avoid in my films are effects that have a CG 'look' to them. The challenge is never let the audience get distracted by thinking that they're watching something made in a computer.
I come from a generation that had no monitors on the sets. You had to go with the director's conviction and be happy with it. I still work like that.
Historically the director has been the key creative element in a film and we must maintain that. We must protect that, in spite of the fact that there is new technology that's continually trying to erode that.
There's going to be no more digital enhancements or digital additions to anything based on any film I direct. I'm not going to do any corrections digitally to even wires that show... If 1941 comes on Blu-ray I'm not going to go back and take the wires out because the Blu-ray will bring the wires out that are guiding the airplane down Hollywood Blvd. At this point right now I think letting movies exist in the era, with all the flaws and all of the flourishes, is a wonderful way to mark time and mark history.
I'm a product of older filmmakers I guess, the past where you get to make movies and scenes are what they are.
To shoot a conventional film means that you are always covering yourself. You are putting nets and, in a way, letting bad decisions take over.
However, that old mode of Polish filmmaking virtually disappeared.
