My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.
I’m quite uncomfortable in front of the still camera. I find it very constrictive, all that posing around.
It was amazing to watch him in the darkroom at an advanced age, still get excited when the results were pleasing. He still struggled like we all do in the darkroom and he struggled behind the camera, and when he had a success he was beaming.
I have very vivid dreams – almost always action-adventure. I’m often on the run. I’ve always had dreams. When I was little, I’d go to sleep with my head on my hands, which were in fists like I was looking through a camera. I felt like sleep was the movies – just drifting off to the movies.
I’ve done panel shows, which I enjoy, and on those you’re recording half-an-hour of TV and sometimes they film for two hours. But with ‘Britain’s Got Talent,’ you’re on camera for eight hours, with a large theatre audience watching – and in between you’re being filmed for ITV2 as you eat your lunch.
If you’re shooting a really serious, dramatic scene, personally I wouldn’t want to look at the camera.
I’m always taking pictures and travelling with a camera and have so many photos that I’ve done a book.
With moviemaking, the audience always has to keep asking, ‘What happens next?’ If you have the wrong piece of music over a scene, people aren’t going to get the scene. If you have the wrong camera angle, people aren’t going to pay attention. That’s as much a part of the process as getting people to talk to you.
The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.
It’s not like I’m nervous of people seeing what I can or can’t do on camera or on TV or anything, or what my engineers think.
As an actor, if you’re just sitting and staring and you don’t know who you are in your own mind, it’s vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.
When it comes to the camera, I can do my thing. But I’m bashful.
The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.
I took my children to see ‘Son of Rambow,’ about two boys who make a home movie with a video camera. When you have children, culturally you become involved in their life.
My face is asymmetric, so it looks very different depending on where the camera shoots. That’s my biggest complex.
I’ve been a big fan always of getting my camera in different places and trying to seek the unusual vantage point.
I feel as though the camera is almost a kind of voyeur in Mr. Bean’s life, and you just watch this bizarre man going about his life in the way that he wants to.
My background is a small town with no movie theater. So… I always pictured myself onstage. I went to acting school and learned all the skills. I left early because I did my first movie and discovered that I really loved the minimalistic work with the camera.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.
I’m an actor. Whether I’m on stage, in front of a camera or a microphone, what I do is the same – although with videogames it requires a lot of imagination.
There’s always going to be that pressure when you’re in front of the camera. When you’re famous it’s just an extreme version of reality and there’s a pressure to look a certain way.
Cameras help to minimize collateral damage, and very often, without a camera a missile cannot fire. Certainly, without a camera a drone can’t function, which means that the very ways in which we wage war are determined in part by how cameras work and whether they work at all.
I think I’ll always prefer theater to working in front of the camera. It seems a more distilled form of the craft.
At the end of Requiem all I wanted to do was get a DV camera and just do a small film. But then the hunger comes back.
I’m a very private person. I don’t go out much. I’m home with kids. I go to work. I don’t really like being the focus of attention, which is why I like being behind the camera more.
When you come from a star family in the South, you’re expected to be really good in dance and fights. It’s really important that you open up as an actor in front of the camera.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
So when I became interested in photography and further being inspired by the work that I saw of Ansel and others, it was a natural extension to go back to these places that I knew as a kid and explore them with my camera.
I had a chance to get used to the lights and the camera without all that pressure to… emote.
I’m much more comfortable and confident running out on the field in front of 70,000 people instead of standing in front of a camera trying to say some lines. The people who do that as a profession are very talented because it’s certainly not easy.
If you’re filming somebody doing something they really want to do, you’re probably not very high on their list of problems to deal with. You see James Carville on the phone – he’s like that whether you have a camera or not. He isn’t doing it just for you, and that’s hard to explain.
I won’t do reality. That is done. And I don’t want people following me around with a camera 24 hours a day.
Being in front of a camera, in a nice dress, getting all dressed up, is extreme. There’s a lot of other extreme situations, you know, just getting out of bed sometimes is extreme – but I do it. Just got to do it, just got to get up. Put your sweatpants on, brush off the dog hair and just get out of the house!
I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That’s never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad’s 8-millimeter movie camera.
I don’t need a coach to tell me what to say. I need a coach to figure out what kind of shirt to wear and how to look at the camera and how to avoid, you know, picking your nose on camera.
At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift.
I prefer theater, but I love to do films, and I prefer theater primarily because I’ve done more. I know less about movies. You can’t lie in either medium. The wonderful thing is that the camera, just like an audience, is made out of skin – because celluloid is skin.
On more than one occasion, the camera has cut to me after a break as I’m still trying to swallow the last bite of cookie. Those of you who have thought to yourselves, ‘That guy talks like he has marbles in his mouth,’ should know that they are not marbles, but oatmeal cookies.
Who said that looking good is not a task? There are so many girls with a well maintained body, but will they be able to walk the beachside in front of the camera wearing a swimsuit? Carrying your body in a certain manner to look sexy is also an art.
Sometimes you’re not always on or at your best, especially during auditions. So if you go in and you don’t nail it, even if they’re like, ‘We don’t need to see you again,’ get a friend, get a video camera, and film you doing the stuff again.
To not be self-conscious of your appearance is huge, and something that I desperately hope to carry into film at some point in my useless life – to not be thinking, ‘My ear looks weird from this angle, why is the camera over there?’
Twenty-four hour news delivers people who stand and talk to camera rather than deliver reported packages with their own camera crew where it’s happening.
My co-stars call me selfish. They say, ‘You are only interested in yourself and what you are only interested is yourself and what you are doing in front of the camera.’ I reply, ‘I can’t help it; it’s what got me where I am.’
I’m really shy with my acting when it’s off, because the camera gives me an excuse to be in character, whereas otherwise I would just feel like an idiot.
You know, every time it comes, every time that light comes on or every time that camera comes on, every time that microphone comes on, the Mac Man seek and destroy.
I am always concerned with finding the right spot and the right shot, so sometimes I forget to appreciate the skill of my fellow adventurers, but I am aware of how my life has been changed by my ability with a camera.
When I see someone filming me, I don’t usually think, ‘No, man, don’t put this up online!’ I’d think, ‘Hey man, you don’t get to go to shows very often, put down the camera and enjoy it!’ I love going to theatre and to shows so much.
I still enjoy acting. I love the moment in front of the camera, but it’s all the other moments that I don’t enjoy. The ‘business’ aspect of it, the gossip. I really dislike about 99% of what I do, but I like that 1% when I’m on camera.
