With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity – voiceover, the camera’s point of view, good acting – but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.
If I find a comedy club where no one’s camera works, I’ll go.
I totally love being on camera.
I feel more comfortable in front of a camera than anywhere else.
In motion pictures, the actor rules. The camera served the actor.
In a way I feel completely frightened of dealing with other human beings at all, yet here I am sticking my face in front of a movie camera all the time.
‘Planet Earth’ was such an extraordinary series and the ‘Making Of’… is fascinating: the creatures and stories behind the camera are just as fascinating as those in front. It’s a bit of a dream come true to be a part of the team in some small way.
Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life… I realised I could find these intimate moments and that people trusted me. That, basically, my camera was magic.
I’m not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with my video camera, it can only record what is happening now. I am celebrating reality and the essence of the moment. And that’s the greatest challenge that I have.
You don’t rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.
No photographer is as good as the simplest camera.
I didn’t need the insurance. I do it again if my DP tells me it didn’t look good in the camera or if the actors didn’t hit their marks. But if everything was working why do it again?
I was born naked. I’m a natural. I’m a natural nude. So I’ve been on camera naked a lot.
Nobody who cooks does it with full hair and makeup in front of a TV camera.
Well, I mean, you have an emotion, you want to express it. You don’t just look in the camera and do it. You want to hide from the embarrassment of your brother saying you’re not allowed to come into my town.
The camera can photograph thought.
I wanted ‘Night of the Living Dead’ to look naturalistic, but we weren’t able to do it because we were shooting with a blimped 35mm camera, which is automatically static.
Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.
For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn’t carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I’d get the camera angle and do the job.
I learned how to make an endoscope using a Swiss Army Knife, a cell phone camera, cell phone, and chewing gum.
We did very little improvisation on camera, and once in a while we did.
The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.
‘Scandal’ has been, for me, the most consistent time I’ve ever logged in front of a camera. I grew up in the theater, and I feel very confident and comfortable on the stage and in front of a live audience, but the camera is a very different medium.
I am interested in people. I’m interested in telling stories, whether that is behind the camera or in front of the camera.
When I act, I don’t even know there’s a camera there, don’t care.
I am the same on camera as I am off. I can’t imagine being any other way.
I like to try to shoot in the city in a way that allows the city to go about its business while we’re shooting, and that’s always a challenge because, unfortunately, people on the street don’t know not to look in the camera or interact with the actors.
I’ve ended up spending more time in front of a camera than on stage, but the stage is where I come from.
I do like being in front of the camera more and more. Having experience behind it has taught me about lighting and angles, how to move, and what looks good and what doesn’t.
My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks.
I was really awful at auditions. There’s something about sitting down and saying into the camera: ‘I’m Nina and this is the name of my agent.’ That makes me just die inside.
I’m never certain of a performance – my own or the other actors’ – or the script or anything… But to me it seems there’s only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.
Haiti itself was also photographed, some of the streets, some of the mountains, rivers, streams, etc. were photographed before talking with me about how I felt about Haiti. Then the camera went to our voodoo temple and saw a serious ceremony, a real ceremony.
When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.
I always take photographs when I attend a funeral. Most people there know who I am and expect me to be there with my camera.
I’ve been in front of a camera since I was a little girl, and that’s the medium I understand.
In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.
I really do believe the camera steals the soul. But that may be because I’m worried about my soul. I don’t have much of a soul to begin with; I can’t afford to lose much.
‘Heyy Babyy’ needed fast cutting and eye contact. It didn’t need fancy camera angles.
I appreciate subtlety. I have never enjoyed a kiss in front of the camera. There’s nothing to it except not getting your lipstick smeared.
When I made ‘Eight Below,’ they wanted me to shoot digital, and I didn’t want to do it because that’s just what I need, to get a great series of takes and then find out the camera was frozen.
Making ‘The Avengers’ was very important to me, but it was also extremely arduous. I missed my friends and I missed my home, so I decided to throw them all on camera, which is the only way I seem to know to relate to people.
I started with the Oakland A’s back in 1971 and there was press at every game and there were cameras on me when I was that young. So with 20 years being MC Hammer, I’m comfortable with cameras so when the camera goes on, I continue doing what I’m doing.
I don’t know if the camera likes me, but I do like the camera.
My mom was a photographer and whenever they needed a baby for a modelling job, she’d stick me in front of the camera. That’s how it started.
I guess people wonder if I’m the same on camera as I am off, and I’m pretty much the same, I really am. But that’s always asked of me.
Jimmy’s Hall’ is set in Ireland in the ’30s and everything that went under the camera we had to generate.
The difference between a regular camera and a 3D camera, for an actor, is really no different except that the turn-arounds are longer. It takes a lot longer to set up a shot because the cinematographer is really trying to set up a whole world, so it can’t be more intricate and more beautiful to the viewers, in 3D.
You never hear of a live-action studio that has been making so-so films looking over at a studio that’s making great movies and going, ‘Oh, we see the difference – we’re using a different camera.’
It is unfortunate that the poor judgment shown by a small group of young actors has tarnished the reputation of every child who has ever appeared before a camera.
I loved being asked 2,000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.
George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.
I moved to California when I was twelve and I got a video camera and made little movies because I didn’t have any friends yet. I would force my sister to make these movies with me – which became my YouTube channel.
I don’t like acting; not in front of the camera.
A lot of actors just do whatever they do, and wherever the camera is, it is. They don’t pay much attention, but I always did. I was always very close to the camera crew. They were my best buddies, no matter what movie or show I was doing.
I have been doing commercials on camera since I was ten.
I don’t get tripped up in technology. I use technology as a tool. ‘Oldboy’ we shot Two Pro 35mm. For ‘Da Blood of Jesus,’ we shot digitally. We shot the new Sony F55. It’s a 4K camera.
Men still control the news, both on and off camera.
The main relationship in the whole series was the one between the camera and Fleabag. I had to convince myself that whoever was watching on the other side of the camera was instantly complicit with Fleabag and instantly a friend of hers.
I love taking pictures. I’m always the one with the camera!
One of my passions is photography. I always carry a camera in my bag whenever I travel. I always take pictures wherever I go, and some of them end up being really crazy ones.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar – you pretend it’s not there.
When I’m about ready to press the cable release on the View camera, I’ve tried to anticipate some of the challenges I’m going to encounter in the darkroom.
