Normally as a director, you do look at other films and things that are relevant. But with this film, it became impossible because I became so aware of the camera placement.
I like having the digital camera on my smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take real pictures.
I didn’t used to do shows, because I used to be so shy. We’d perform, and I’d be at the back, thinking of another song. I was so shy, I ain’t never getting in front of the camera; I would never get on stage.
I have such freedom when I’m living through a mask, and by contrast, can feel very exposed when a camera is capturing my real face. Kind of like the difference between walking out your front door in a sweater and jeans or in a Speedo.
You won’t see me on TMZ shaving my hair and yelling at the camera guy.
You have license in front of the camera to do things, feel certain emotions that you don’t get to in real life. It can be addicting.
Working in front of the camera keeps me alive. I couldn’t care less about actors’ trailers and food on sets and stuff like that – I just want to act.
You can be in an acting class all you want, but you don’t fully learn until you get off that stage and in front of a camera.
Hey, I fool the camera. I’m a liar, a magician.
I just know I’m made for the camera.
The goal is to have to do the shot again because the camera guy shook a little bit as he was laughing. Without that happening, I’m not happy because there’s nothing better for me than a world that everybody’s just trying to make each other laugh.
I think the process is one of using the camera and sound in the way a detective uses a magnifying glass: to find the clues. They’re discovery devices, not performance devices – you’re watching things the way a cat does. You’re not judging. You’re there to witness something.
I really don’t act. I just live what George and I are doing. It has to make some sort of sense to me, or it won’t ring true. No matter what the script says, there’s no audience and no footlights and no camera for me. There’s no make-believe. It’s for real.
As an actor, you’ve to be honest while giving any shot, the camera is same in any medium, the sound system, too. So, it doesn’t matter.
When you perform in front of an audience after only two days of rehearsal, you’re flying by the seat of your pants – particularly when they’re rewriting the show right up to the moment the camera goes on.
I spent every day just praying that I didn’t look like a big dork on camera.
And I also have a camera, a Web cam, and I have one at home, so I can hook up and talk to the girls, and they can see me while we’re on the bus in the middle of nowhere.
In films people basically work for the camera, you know, and that’s why actors can hate each other and not be speaking to each other and still look as if they’re in love because really they’re loving the camera loving them.
We just said, ‘Okay, you’re in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you’re on camera, that’s your wardrobe.’ But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.
I love improvisation. You can’t blame it on the writers. You can’t blame it on direction. You can’t blame it on the camera guy… It’s you. You’re on. You’ve got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you’ve got.
I’m always reaching for something we really haven’t done, and War of the Worlds has a lot of this sort of documentary look to it and first-person camera view that is a new thing for me. I’ve done some stuff like that before, but nothing like the extent of this and digitally.
I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.
Because I trained in theater, I always leave a film shoot feeling like I haven’t done anything, like I just sat in front of the camera and whispered, essentially.
On television, you have an intimate moment with the camera. In theater, you are making something live with people there. My brain doesn’t understand that you don’t get another take ever. I’m finally learning on TV that you can do something over if you make a mistake.
Painting directly from nature is difficult as things do not remain the same; the camera helps to retain the picture in your mind.
In Hitchcock’s eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.
It’s embarrassing standing in front of the camera and getting your picture taken.
There was a sense of all the things that go on on the street, particularly in New York, that you are just completely unaware of, that that conversation could be happening at any time. I loved the instability of the camera. It’s just an unstable world.
I play myself all the time, on camera and off. What else can I do?
There’s just such a premium on hurrying, and the camera is the be all and end all, and the actors had better hurry up and get it right and get it done.
Look, some days, you have to film a sequence in which the rain is pounding down on someone and you’re just turning the camera on what’s happening. And other days, you occasionally have to spray Robert Pattinson in the face with a firehose.
I also know what looks good before the camera, how to move the camera, and how to get a story on the screen.
My wife Mariana is a good photographer too and, like me, she just picks up a camera and takes a picture when she sees something, rather than looking too deeply into it.
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
I went for officer training to be a fighter pilot, but never got past the aptitude test. So I decided to put on makeup and ponce about in front of a camera.
I really learned how to act on camera through ‘Power Rangers’ because I hadn’t done a lot of film and TV.
The camera doesn’t make you a better person, it doesn’t even change the person that you are, it just magnifies who you are.
I moved to L.A. to write and direct. I had no intentions of being in front of the camera.
If this validates anything, it’s that learning how to bunt and hit and run and turning two is more important than knowing where to find the little red light at the dug out camera.
In a thriller, the camera’s an active narrator, or can be.
We can’t laugh quite as much on camera, but we sure do on the set.
I remember the beginnings of the Kurzweil reading machine. I was one of the first to meet Ray Kurzweil and purchase the reading machine in Boston. To think that the machine was at least two and a half large suitcases at the time, and now you have a camera and it takes a picture and you have sound.
One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.
I’ve always viewed myself as a behind-the-scenes person rather than in front of the camera.
I was known as a dogged, unflappable live reporter, the kind who runs barefoot to the camera, high heels in one hand, notebook in the other.
I’m much happier behind the camera.
It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.
We have parties at my house. My girlfriends and I play our iPods, with all of our favorite songs. We pick our songs and jump up on the counter and dance, and do runway stuff, and we take video with my camera. When I’m with my girlfriends, I act like I’m 19.
My first pictures are from 1972, and my first proper camera dates back to 1973. During the first year I used my father’s camera. It had a flash on it, which I don’t like, but I didn’t know anything about photography back then, so it was just what I did.
Being a songwriter does not rely on an audience or other band members or a camera. I can just sit in a room and write songs.
Today my passion is still black and white. Today if I have an array of cameras in front of me the one I would reach for that I would feel most comfortable with would be a 4 X 5 View camera. I was once working in a sort of soft light situation.
Being a photographer is like listening to music. If you have a camera, by just living your life you’re bound to find some things that are worth taking a picture of. You don’t have to be an audiophile to have taste in music. It happens through osmosis.
I have a theory that the only way you can be any good is if the camera likes you. If the camera doesn’t like you, you are gone.
As mayor, I got used to the fact that when you walked out of the house in the morning to pick up the newspaper in your boxers, there could be a camera there.
In ‘Purab Aur Paschim’, Manoj Kumar offered me a meaningful cameo. He directed me efficiently and I was able to improve on my histrionics and appeared more confident in front of the movie camera.
Although I was entirely relaxed on camera, if I had to stand up and say something to an assembled group of people, I was rendered all but inarticulate.
When I was on ‘SNL,’ I was getting weirdly anxious about being on camera, which I had never really done before. And so my solution was just to not watch my stuff. And then I found out that other actors do it, too, and I felt less weird about it.
