A Quote by F. Gary Gray

I don't have a typical filmmaker background. I didn't grow up with a super eight camera or a video camera. I didn't start cutting movies when I was four or five. — © F. Gary Gray
I don't have a typical filmmaker background. I didn't grow up with a super eight camera or a video camera. I didn't start cutting movies when I was four or five.
I've been acting since I was 2 and have always been on camera but doing a video is different because when you're acting, you pretend the camera's not there and you just do the scene and with a music video you're right in the camera so it feels weird sometimes.
A sitcom, you rehearse for four days of the week and then you shoot it all in one night in front of a studio audience. It's like a play every week, you just shoot it over a seven or eight-day period with a single camera. I enjoy this format of show much more. I'm a feature guy. I like making movies. So the four camera thing I didn't love it that much. I found myself slightly out of my element.
Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.
I wanted to be a filmmaker, so my parents helped me by encouraging me to save my allowance. So I bought my first video camera, and I would make movies, but I never made a movie that I finished until I was in college. There was no expectation, but I would make movies every day.
I have received the digital camera as a blessing. It has really changed my life as a filmmaker, because I don't use my camera anymore as a camera. I don't feel it as a camera. I feel it as a friend, as something that doesn't make an impression on people, that doesn't make them feel uncomfortable, and that is completely forgotten in my way of approaching life and people and film.
No one was jumping up and saying, 'Yeah, let me give you money.' I had never held a camera in my hand - a home video camera, nothing. I had not directed.
My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.
When you're doing a single-camera show, it's more buying into a level of reality. I think a sitcom, a four-camera show, doesn't require that so much. I think with a film show, you just need the characters to grow.
Whenever there's a camera around, a video or film camera, it's a great deal harder for those in power to bury the story.
The stigma that used to exist many years ago, that actors from film don't do television, seems to have disappeared. That camera doesn't know it's a TV camera... or even a streaming camera. It's just a camera.
When I was an actor in some movies a long time ago, I was so curious about all the camera movements - why is the camera placed here, and why does it move like this? And why the set and the background, the color? It's a lot of questions for me to ask, because I was so interested, not only in acting, but also the whole process of filmmaking.
In the the late seventies and early eighties, I played background roles in thirty movies... Woody Allen movies, Scorsese films, you name it. Whatever was being shot in New York, I was doing stand-in and background work because I wanted to be close to the camera; I wanted to see what was going on.
It was extremely useful to grow up in front of the camera. It gives the camera no significance. I think it helped me have perspective on things. The attraction that Hollywood can have, I feel like I'm over that. Instead I just concentrate on acting.
In the grand spectrum of things in WWE, you are wrestling for that camera and that camera and that camera - and all the cameras they have - and you have to make things work that way because, through that camera, there's a million people watching.
I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it's the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television - nothing.
The camera has a mind of its own--its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze--the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears.
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