Top 179 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Cinematographers - Page 3

As the cinematographer is usually more visual than the director is and full cooperation is really the answer and to make a great film, you need a good director and you need a good cinematographer.

If you hate something, it bonds you to the thing you hate.

["War Horse"] does have action as well, but we allow the audience to appreciate the environment where these characters are from because the lens shapes the people, as we know.

As we've seen the rise of cultural, environmental and educational tourism in adventure travel, we've also seen the rise of female participation. Part of that is due to changes in women's attitudes about their own abilities. As more women participate in such things as fly-fishing, whitewater kayaking and bicycling, we're also seeing concurrent growth in those areas in adventure travel.

I have a 22-year-old son, and when my son was born I made a decision to raise him. My husband and I took turns working, and it's easier to raise a kid in the documentary world, where you go away for two weeks or three weeks rather than the months that you spend on a feature. That was and still is much more open to women DPs than the world of fiction.

[Spielberg] surrounds himself with great crew members who are at the top of their game and know their stuff. He motivates us by liking what we do, and he doesn't get paralyzed by the process or by new ideas. He embraces them and uses them.

It's very hard to go to Monument Valley and not think of John Ford's films.

I think women have made progress in cinematography, contrary to women directors, who I think have regressed. There are many more women cinematographers than when I started.

Most people are good people. But they're afraid to speak out, they're afraid for their safety and their jobs. And unfortunately that dictates a lot of their actions.

I think too many film students in America are losing the artistry and not learning lighting the right way.

As important as it is to learn the techniques of cinematography, you also have to learn how to deal with the movie set, with show business. I came up with a cinematographer who is very talented, but she was never quite able to handle everything else you have to do - dealing with the producer and the crew and the time frame that you have to follow.

The studios are never going to make $200 million a picture with those types of movies. It's not familiar to them, and it's not a model that can necessarily be sustained. Now, if they go back to making movies about people ... well, I hope they do that.

I think, retrospectivety helps to hone your ideas for future projects. I like it.

There are a lot of cameramen but not so many photographers. And a lot of cameramen attack from a technical approach without much imagination. They look, but they don't see.

I'm always looking for directors who are very strong, they have great ideas, but on the other hand, that need help. It means they rely mostly on my eyes.

Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.

I'm always looking in the lighting to tell the story in a different way than it actually looks in real life because it's, for me, more contrast sometimes has to mean it's softer than normal.

A good [film] director is talented, imaginative, and does his homework.

I know I will die with either a camera in hand or a woman on top - what more could one ask of life?

Very few people make exterior movies anymore. It's always action films driven by action and quick editing.

I just directed another picture called 'American Dream' with Nick Stahl. Just finished shooting principal photography right before I started ['Lincoln'].

It makes no sense to bad mouth people, but I think Jean-Luc Godard is astonishing as a survivalist, somebody who can do a film that is as extraordinary as Goodbye to Language.

It's all about special effects and explosions now. It leaves me just cold when I walk out of the theater. There's no heart; there's no soul. Movies used to be about people. It's as though we don't tell stories any more. The studios have to make money, and if you want to make $20 million, you have to spend $200 million.

There are, of course, many, many, many good cinematographers and unfortunately they don't work as much as many of those people who do those crazy, stupid movies.

I think that film is still an artform and it doesn't really matter if you're using a digital camera or a film camera.

Sometimes, I think having less money can lead to more artistry.

Grips and electricians have done more to help me shoot good movies than any other craft.

If you need to strap a camera to you or get in a small space, then it makes sense to use digital.I do think it is possible to use a digital camera artistically, but it can only be good if you are using film technique. Film has grain, and digital has pixels, and there is not that much of a difference, but digital does not replace the need to create a scene and light it properly and spend time considering the shot.

I think all cinematographers, at least most of them, would love to do everything on location because you cannot cheat on location. It's there, it's part of the story usually. You have to deal with the elements. You have the sunshine, you have rain, you have fog - it really makes you work harder to try to match things during the day to make it look like it was shot within five minutes, movie time.

There is a difference between creating something and just capturing something. And when we were using film, it was not that fast, and it was expensive, so there was incentive to make sure the shot was exactly right before we rolled. With digital, it's fast and its cheap, and it's easy to bypass the rest.

The best way to know when there's good lighting is when you don't notice it.

Resentment is like taking poison in hopes that your enemy will die.

Sometimes the shots serve as homages to other movies and other directors, like Hitchcock.

There is something missing in a lot of digital filmmaking, something I call "poetic reality." That's something you see played out in film noir, where the technique establishes the mood.

We are all made of flesh, of matter. And at the end, this matter is dissolved in light, and transformed into energy. It’s the Einstein formula. Energy is nothing but matter that is moving at the speed of light, squared

I take every film as it comes.

What interested me in film was the image-making aspect of it. So, I went to school in cinematography. I was really convinced that image was what I wanted to do, and I think it came from the fact that I lived in a small town my whole life, but my mother was very interested in painting, so she would bring us to Paris for two weeks. So, we're going to the Louvre and to the museums and to see shows. In the evening we were seeing theater. Painting is basically what led me. I think the image was key.

Light. Light I think is knowledge. Knowledge is love. Love is freedom. Freedom is energy. Energy is all. Without light, we can't have images.

A huge problem in movies or with people who work on movies is that two people can look at the same thing but they don't necessarily see the same thing.

Mexican cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio Fernandez were students of both Sergei Eisenstein and Toland. Their exteriors and lighting were gorgeous. And the films Ingmar Bergman did with Sven Nykvist were exceptional.

It would be horrible to be micro-managed! I don't think directors can really micro-manage people. It's just impossible.

When you are shooting a movie, you have to collaborate with many, many, many people. First of all, the director with all his own ideas and I can only just help him with that. I cannot change his idea.

I hate when somebody says, "This may not work." You'll never get anywhere with that. I've pushed a lot of people out of my way - I don't mean physically - over them being afraid something isn't going to work.

We have not looked at any particular movies [in creating War Horse], but again, it's hard not to see the similarities between those movies [because of those filmmakers' influence on the industry].

Leica are known for their still camera lenses and in the last year and a half have come out with a series of film lenses and they are brilliant. The best thing about them, apart from their quality, which is uniform, is that each one is the same size, pretty much the same weight... So in terms of fitting into the rig, everything is almost purpose built for that and the quality is beautiful, really beautiful.

I love Woody Allen. He's very clever, always thinking, and he's great with actors. He lets actors do what they want to do and occasionally he'll give them a specific kind of direction.

The idea of blaming alcohol or drugs or quote-unquote "promiscuity" is a false path. The real issue is that men should not hurt women.

When the cinematography school told me I would have no chance to get a job, I said, "It's irrelevant." My mom was a feminist in the '20s. She taught me to be on my own, to be independent, to do what I wanted to do. I did not believe it would be difficult. It was difficult. In '66, I almost starved for a year and a half, and the only way I did not starve was because I could not find a job in camera, but I found a job in editing.

What we really are trying to do day to day now is to wake up every day and think about more activist behavior - what we can do to move the needle on the climate crisis, whether it is calling legislators or trying to win the conversation with someone who might not see the issues the way do.

In Slumdog Millionaire when you are immersed in the point of view of children in the slum and the bustle of the city, the handheld camerawork is amazing. A handheld camera is perfect for establishing point-of-view and for instilling the feeling that you are there.

Images, not words, capture feelings in faces; nothing can ruin the atmosphere as easily as too much light.

I hope that film is going to stay as an artform and that people won't forget that there are good movies also to be made.

I always try to tell the story the best possible way. I create the mood for each scene in a way that the audience feels that they are right there with me and they feel actually in the mood that was right for the scene.

It's great to be recognized for work, and the work is great, but once you have the awards, it becomes less important. It just gives you the ability to do better work, in my opinion.

There are films that are difficult. There are films that would actually affect your personal life because of the length of the production, how long [you're away] from the family.

We exchanged a couple of ideas and stuff like that, but that's about it. I just think ... consulting on 'Tintin' was very interesting because you try to ... not educate, but inform the animators [about] what the lighting looks like, but [in the end] they do it themselves. I don't actually go and sit there with them. [We] just had a couple of conversations.

When you live in Israel, there are restrictions which come from budget definitely. I came to the point where I had shot many fiction, many feature films, but at one point it began to bore me. It was boring because when you're Gordon Willis or when you are a legend of American cinematography, you know that you are gradually building yourself and you can go into bigger budgets and experiment more. In Israel, the budgets are very, very limited.

Every individual should have a purpose in life which is worthy of intense effort-and constantly work toward the definite goal ahead.

I should mention Vittorio Storaro, who was Bernardo Bertolucci's cinematographer. You watch those films and they are exceptional.