A Quote by Mike Leigh

If I'm ever working on a set and anyone talks about a master shot, I say there is no master shot. Before I even went to film school, I learned about movies by being in a British feature film, where everything was shot master shot, mid-shot, close-up. But I reject the idea of a master shot. You don't shoot everything mechanically; you find imaginative ways that serve the action.
Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.
It comes to the point where, if a midrange shot is there, I'm going to take it. If I'm open, I have to shoot that shot. That's a great shot for the team and myself.
I never start editing a film until it's completely shot; I don't edit along the way, ever. When it's finished I come in here [screening room] and we start with reel one, scene one and start editing shot by shot by shot until we're finished.
I shot film with the Coen brothers on 'Hail, Caesar!' That's fine. I'm sentimental about film; I've shot film for forty years or something.
Who shot you?" For a moment he looked annoyed. "I fail to see what that's got to do with anything. Reading assures me that anyone who's ever met me would have reason to shoot me, so I must admit with all candor that I have no idea. Was it you?" "If I'd shot you I wouldn't have missed," she said. "Was that wishful thinking or are you in fact a practiced shot?" "Desire would have made up for lack of expertise.
Does anyone remember who shot Kubrick's movies? Do you remember who shot David Lean's movies? No one remembers who shot 'Dr. Strangelove' or 'Barry Lyndon.'
I don't worry about the last shot or the next shot. I concentrate. Every shot gets a clean slate. And when a shot is over, I wipe it out absolutely. Tell a joke or something. If you worry about how you looked, how well you did, you'll go insane.
I've had the pleasure of working in the U.K. a few times before. I've shot a few movies there before. One of them was Neil Simon's 'London Suite,' which was based on his play. I also shot a film in Dublin, a little film with Bernadette Peters, called 'Bobbie's Girl.'
I shot my undergraduate work on 35mm. I love the way it looks, but I haven't shot film in a while. If you can avoid scanning, it makes your practice faster. Oh, and I shoot a lot of Polaroid, too. I have about five hundred Polaroids from my film that I hope to show soon.
I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film.
Anybody that shoots a hook shot, whatever hand, I jump up and cheer because it's the easiest shot, it's the best tweener shot.
Every shot feels like the first shot of the day. If I'm on the range hitting shot after shot, I can hit them just as good as I did when I was 30. But out on the course, your body changes between shots. You get out of the cart, and you've got this 170-yard 5-iron over a bunker, and it goes about 138.
There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable.
When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you're doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.
It's been a part of my game for life. It's tougher to finish in the lane so you've got to find different areas to score efficiently and the mid-range contested shot is a shot a lot of teams will live with. And it's a shot I'm willing to live with as well just because I've gotten so many shots at it and I'm comfortable with it.
I mean, one shot you treat like you have forty little matches instead of one forty shot match. It makes all the difference in the world. It's easier to just forget about a not so good shot.
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