Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I hate to do the same thing twice.
The juxtaposition of India and Australia is such a great one to explore.
My daughter is a bit annoyed with me that she didn't get to meet Baby Yoda.
The difference between a good shot and bad shot can be an inch to the left.
As a DP who mostly does features, I'm normally in a director's pocket, 24/7.
I think I signed my left kidney to Disney and my right kidney to George Lucas.
I had to forget a lot of 'Star Wars' when I was making 'Dune.' It wasn't hard, though.
Star Wars has built-in scale. Everybody understands it, we know the scale of the universe.
The 'Batman' franchise is iconic and its a privilege to now be able to visualize it in my own way.
There's always the temptation, as a cinematographer, to make the shot look as perfect as possible.
I don't love big films for the sake of big films. It's not been a career drive to get to that point.
It's never been my goal to do 'big' films because a big film in itself is not very interesting to me.
India has a natural brownness to it, a natural yellowness, a sepia tone to it, with the dust in the air.
I place 'Star Wars' on such a pedestal, like many of my peers do, given that we all grew up with these stories.
Robert Pattinson is an incredibly gifted actor. Every role that Pattinson plays is a contender for an acting award.
Effectively, as a cinematographer, I am always on the lookout for a project that makes me want to go to the cinema.
Where we shot in India, you could literally dump the camera off the back of the truck and you'd have an amazing shot.
A lot of the time, what happens is, when you shoot in L.A., you tend to be able to do things faster, believe it or not.
Despite what everyone thinks about science fiction, ultimately, at its best, it's about human beings with human emotions.
It sounds very hippy, I'm sorry, but like if you put something out to the world, you'll get the same thing back plus more.
Rubber looks different to skin and it's very, very hard to make a prosthetic on a human look convincing if you don't light them correctly.
For me, 'Mary Magdalene' is the most beautiful film I've shot with the performances and the script and the actors and ensemble. But not one saw it.
This is the good thing about commercials, is one week I'm working with Derek Cianfrance and the next week I'm working with another really good friend.
Google Earth has become a little bit of an icon in our society. You get on maps and you wanna see what the quality of the road's like, you go on Google Maps.
When you have the blue screen, you've got another set of eyes, eight months down the track, designing what you should have been designing on stage with the actor.
I'm confident that the wrong cinematographer on a project can very much derail the mood and the feeling on set when you're trying to create a bubble of trust, effectively.
The film business talks a lot. People talk a lot. There's a lot of chatting. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes chatting. There's a lot of talking before you go and do it.
The good thing about India, and the good thing about Melbourne, is that it's very, very hard on this planet of ours to find two places that are almost diametrically opposed.
It's been a dream to work alongside the talented team at Lucasfilm and ILM to make advancements and improvements to the filmmaking process to help tell stories more efficiently.
Everyone knows that a movie is false. But if as filmmakers we give the audience too many reasons to lose the suspension of disbelief, I believe we're working our way down a hole.
This is the great thing about my friends over at Lucasfilm: They are so committed to the highest quality product that they allow their DPs to come on well in advance of the shoot.
The reason I loved doing films like 'Rogue One,' 'Zero Dark Thirty' and 'Lion' was that there was enough breadth and difference in those projects to properly represent my interests.
I'm a firm believer, and some people may disagree, and I'm happy to have a beer with them and talk about it, but I believe that locations are such an integral character to the movie.
On a film, you work with somebody for four months and it's wonderful, but commercials it's like catching up with someone for a beer except you happen to shoot something at the same time.
It's either some sort of a kismet or something that I've been offered a film like 'Zero Dark Thirty,' which I would have lined up to be the first one to watch that movie, had I not shot it.
The real kudos need to go to my family, who have supported my crazy filmmaking dreams - from Melbourne, to L.A., England and the wider world - by supporting my projects and passions over the past years.
I remember borrowing my mum's Instamatic 110 camera as a kid and doing still lifes of tennis balls and benches and thinking they were going to be something really amazing. They ended up being really bad.
There's a reason why Europeans take siesta in the middle of the day. It's not just because it's hot, but because it doesn't feel good to be outside or look at light when it's coming straight down overhead.
I did a lot of prep for 'Rogue One' while I was working on 'Lion,' so I could take the skills I learned in India and apply them to 'Rogue' and then take the skills I learned on 'Rogue' and apply it to 'Lion.'
Trying to capture the essence of India is almost like trying to bottle magic, which is hard to do because India is so broad and diverse - it's controlled chaos. But there's spirituality and wholeness to the people.
I did 'Vice' with Christian Bale and 'Foxcatcher' with Steve Carell - both of those films had significant prosthetic work. You do need to be cognizant of the fact that the material that you're photographing is not skin.
If you've ever experienced being in an Indian train station as the train pulls in, even as a six-foot adult, it's incredibly scary. You just have people storming at you, bumping around you, without any regard to your safety.
I've spent a lot of time in India. When I was a young cinematographer, I was completely enthralled by the color, the movement, the sounds. But photographically, it was very hard to capture it; photographs rarely did it justice.
It was very confronting after growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, then going to India. There's such a different emphasis on everything: food, family, hygiene, love, marriage. It's why it's so exciting, why it's so beautiful.
Looking through the camera lens reduces noise; as humans we see a million shapes, colours and textures. What the lens does, what art does in general, is get rid of all the noise. It hones in and isolates the qualities of a scene.
Every film that gets made, and I'm not just talking about 'Star Wars,' I'm talking about Marvel, DC, every tent pole film - they seem to just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The worlds get bigger, the stakes get bigger.
I mean listen, ultimately I'm positive George Lucas was inspired by 'Dune' when he made 'Star Wars.' I don't know if that's sacrilegious to talk about, but there are a lot of similarities in some areas, so you could tell he was definitely influenced by that.
I rewatched a lot of 'Star Wars' when I did 'Rogue One,' and the thing I learned was that as a young person, consuming 'Star Wars' at the level that I consumed 'Star Wars,' it kind of molds your visual psyche, so you see the world in 'Star Wars'-ian fashion.
Emotionally, light very much influences, I feel, the audience. It's not something that most audience members are conscious of, which is a good thing, because it means as filmmakers, we have the opportunity to gently control an audience into feeling a certain way.
The key is you don't want to control the controlled stuff too much and you don't want to be too free flowing in uncontrolled situations. That can be a contentious issue with some directors. The joy of my career is I've gotten to work with great directors who get that balance.