A Quote by Benjamin Avila
I operate the camera, I always do it when I'm the director, and I like to approach it as a documentary, finding the images based on what happens, as it happens.
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I never really approach collaborations as kind of normal things where they're arranged and they happen because you've arranged them. I've always been like this, I just have friends I hang out with, and while we're hanging out, if music happens then it happens.
When you're making a real documentary, you shoot it and the movie happens. You don't make - this sounds corny - you don't make a documentary, a documentary makes you. It really does.
Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads
When you go live, anything can happen. It excites me because it means I have to be on. When the camera's on, whatever happens happens.
My family lives in Miami, and I always envision myself, if something happens, it'd be like 'The Day After Tomorrow' where I walk across country to find my family. That would be the kind of person I would be. I feel like I wouldn't be as scared. If it happens, it happens. You face it.
I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.
It is not what happens that determines the major part of your future. What happens, happens to us all. It is what you do about what happens that counts.
Educators who have said, "We don't like that, so we'll continue to teach as if it's not happening," are just aggravating the gap between what happens in schools and what happens in the real world. Because of their personalities, or for cultural reasons, some kids might better express themselves through moving images and sound.
Before I published my first book, I worked for a while as a documentary and wedding/bar mitzvah videographer, and a part of me still mourns the lost filmmaker I'll never be. Working on a documentary is nearly the opposite artistic process to writing: as a writer you are always trying to fill out a world to fit your story, but as a documentarian your work is to carve a story out of the world. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly blocked at my computer, I miss the days when I could just point my camera at something interesting and wait to see what happens.
You can always go back and reconstruct stuff in a documentary, but it's so much cooler when you're there as it happens.
A deeper truth the camera can see can be more surprising than even the director imagined it could be. That's a wonderful thing that grows and happens in films.
The best directing style is the one that lets me do whatever I want. Seriously though, I like to be challenged and I like to collaborate. I love finding the medium between what I think and what a director does. I hate when a director uses the "my way or the highway" approach. But it also sucks when they tell you everything you do is great and offer no input. It's a fine line a director has to walk. It is a hard job.
To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention... Documentary approach to cinema differs from that of story-film not in its disregard for craftsman-ship, but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put. Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The pot-maker makes pots, and the documentarian documentaries.
A strange thing happens to me that I'm sure happens to a lot of actors when the camera starts rolling. I'm not 'me' any more.
I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.
I try to learn from both, from features and documentaries. In both cases you have to find a way to make the camera as discreet as possible, and flexible enough to be able to capture the moment when it happens. I know from documentary how to not have a preconceived idea of what the scene could be.
