A Quote by Sydney Pollack
The terrible tragedy for every director is to watch an actor do what you want and not have the camera rolling - and never get it back again. So I always try to roll the camera before anybody's really ready.
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I've always said the one advantage an actor has of converting to a director is that he's been in front of the camera. He doesn't have to get in front of the camera again, subliminally or otherwise.
When the photographer is nearby, I like to say, 'Quick, get a photo of me looking into the camera,' because I'm never looking into the camera. Christopher Nolan looks into the camera, but I think most directors don't, so whenever you see a picture of a director looking at the camera, it's fake.
When I work, I really try to get absorbed in the character. Unless I want to do something playful with the camera, I'm not too worried about where the camera is or positions.
You don't want to be the guy whose back's to the camera in the emotional part of the movie. So, you have to be aware of the camera movement and what the camera's doing.
As a director, what matters is how you penetrate the soul of the person in front of the camera and let the actor blur the boundaries between the character and the person themselves. In order to achieve that, I try to make people feel at ease, to be mindless of problems and be skinless and give everything to the camera.
Making photos is helpful of course to master the craft. To get comfortable with the camera. Learn what a camera can do and how to use the camera successfully. Doing exercises for example if you try to find out things that the camera can do that the eye cannot do. So that you have a tool that will do what you need to be done. But then once you have mastered the craft the most important thing is to determine why you want to shoot pictures and what you want to shoot pictures of. That's where the thematic issue comes to life.
I want to be the person who eventually doesn't have to be in front of the camera. I can be behind the camera and really change things cinematically, and this is giving me an opportunity to do something behind the camera, which I really want to maximize.
I had done some stuff on camera, then I did some film dubbing when I lived in Europe. When I came back, I'd considered doing on-camera work again, but I didn't really like it.
The actors feel very free. The actor, he doesn't need to think about where the camera is, he just has to focus on what he's doing and forget the camera. The camera is never in the perfect position, and I think this is what keeps this feeling of reality. The frame is not perfect.
I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.
There was a choice of being a director who's more familiar with the technicality of doing a movie, like learning about the camera and filters and setup, or being a director who can actually talk to actors. And I always wanted to be an actor's director.
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.
I never go to the monitor. I just look at the camera monitor and my favorite part of all of the directing, except for the writing and editing of it, is right when we're rolling and they do lines and I'll say "Try this, try this, try this."
In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you're using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you're taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth.
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.
The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.
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