Words matter. These are the best Greig Fraser Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
The juxtaposition of India and Australia is such a great one to explore.
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.
India has a natural brownness to it, a natural yellowness, a sepia tone to it, with the dust in the air.
Every single discussion I have with a first AD, or producers, is time of day. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve fought for early-morning calls. The light is 90 percent of our job; we as humans respond to light and where it is at different times of day and not only in positive ways.
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.’
Effectively, as a cinematographer, I am always on the lookout for a project that makes me want to go to the cinema.
Doing a ‘Star Wars’ TV show could be prohibitively expensive because ‘Star Wars’ requires a lot of prop building and a lot of character building, so we wanted to – with ILM’s help – be able to make it a financially viable option to solve all the problems that you have with shooting a blue screen environment.
Some of the films I’ve been most happy with have been the films that don’t see a lot of traction.
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.
As a DP who mostly does features, I’m normally in a director’s pocket, 24/7.
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.
It’s never been my goal to do ‘big’ films because a big film in itself is not very interesting to me.
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.
Despite what everyone thinks about science fiction, ultimately, at its best, it’s about human beings with human emotions.
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.
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 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.
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.
My daughter is a bit annoyed with me that she didn’t get to meet Baby Yoda.
I don’t love big films for the sake of big films. It’s not been a career drive to get to that point.
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 difference between a good shot and bad shot can be an inch to the left.
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.
I hate to do the same thing twice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
