Every other movie is one of those action things. I mean, 'Lost in Space'? A bunch of good actors running around shooting at special effects on a soundstage? I took my kids to see that and felt like I was on an acid trip.
On the set of 'Community,' we quote 'Community' to each other. We're a lost cause. We're like a bunch of little kids running around and yelling things.
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.
If there's a movie of Neuromancer, what I really want the special effects guys to do is make you see, from Case's point of view, the little acid giggies: the little lines and trails coming off of things.
If we don't have the actors, or you get the sense that some of the other people involved in making the movie don't necessarily see the movie the way you see it - all those elements, for us, we like having those things feel like they're moving in the same direction.
I had no special effects, no monsters running around, nothing blew up; those things are all things I've done so many times that they lose their allure after a while.
I loved the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Lion and you could kind of see the actors' faces in them. It wasn't an entirely new face sculpted around them. What made those characters so human and appealing to me was seeing those great actors underneath there. They weren't lost behind a bunch of appliances.
Shooting videos with lots of effects is like shooting a bunch of puzzle pieces.
Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.
We've got pictures from the Space Station going back 20 years. We can see the glaciers receding in the photography that we do. We can see the effects of lakes drying up and other things that are happening around the planet.
I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable.
It felt really nice to not have anybody talking about numbers, and no one is talking about ratings. From my experience, it felt like there was one person running the ship and it felt like there was space for Jenji to be at the helm. That's not what I've experienced in television before. It felt more akin to an interesting movie, where there were producers who were really excited by the work and wanted to make space for the director's vision to be sort of shared with an audience. It felt more cohesive.
I think 'The Lost World' could've been a successful movie except for the fact that it pre-dated the good special effects and computer graphics.
I went in right up front and said, This can't be about some guy in bandages. I didn't even want to do a horror movie. I took the concept and made a romantic adventure film. I like action heroes who don't take themselves too seriously. I wanted to make everyone take the mummy seriously, but it couldn't just be a guy in bandages. But the main thing was to build in surprises. That's one of the great things you can do with special effects.
Something like 'The Matrix' would be ideal, something where it's super agents and wire work and special effects - not necessarily running from bombs and shooting people. Something more sleek, like an assassin.
Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.
We [with Brandy Burre ] like fifteen feet away from each other. You can see my house and my car in pretty much every exterior shot in the movie. It was like filming at my extended house. My kids and her kids are the same age and they're best friends. Every summer they play with each other. We were intensely close friends beforehand in part because we take care of each other's kids.