Robert Ingpen Quotes

I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

The art of movies is to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief. They need to use their imaginations.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

There are things that I teach, about building photographs, and that's why people come to my workshops. When people come to the workshops, they're consumed with seeking the subject, and I teach seeking the setting.

Some things definitely work better on film than in books. Introspection is great in books but it doesn't work on film. Anything with high intensity, whether it's a love scene, a car chase, a fight scene - those things work so well on film and oftentimes they can tell a much broader part of the story.

I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream... allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.

Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

Even if it's a "talking head documentary" about a social movement or something along those lines, I've always thought of editing the timing and the sense of the piece for the theatrical experience.

We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that's the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary. Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it's called documentary, which I suppose is all right ... We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.

We always for better or worse try to put on paper what's going up on screen - whether we're directing it or not. It's really just an extension of that habit which is trying to tell the reader what the movie will look like. Ultimately that is the job of a screenwriter to a certain extent.

I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties... To tell a story, you don't photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, This is what it's like if you're a dead civilian in Vietnam.

When I'm writing a comic book, I'm thinking about a character that I'm going to be drawing on the page. I've never drawn a character to look like who I want to cast in a movie because I don't think that way. I'm a real monomaniac. I do one thing at a time.

I keep trying to train myself to stop saying 'filmmaker' and start saying 'storyteller.' We're telling stories.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

The level of control, that's part of what's so appealing about filmmaking - you have so much control over what the reader, the viewer, is noticing from moment to moment. They can't do that boring boring boring thing as easily.

What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.

The thing I loved the most about being art director was picking the photographers and working with them.

Film is very much about sitting around and talking about ideas, and that's the stuff that I love, but I haven't experienced that yet in the television that I've done so far. It makes me long for movies again because, creatively, I always have a much more fulfilling experience there.

"Real" drawing is about specifics. It's about describing an object as accurately as possible. In a comic strip you have to draw a picture of the idea of the object. You have to draw the word that you are picturing, then you have to mix in specifics with it for it to work as a story. But you are still working with drawn words.

When you manage to express something with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the character speak, I think it's a more complete work.

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. Let the learning continue.