Filming Techniques Quotes

I'll reshoot a corridor 13 different ways, and you'll never recognise them.

When I first filmed things, they were always slightly awkward.

In the first season (of 'Californication'), when we had the threesome with the nipple clamps, I was, like, 'I don't get this, I don't know how you're gonna do it.' And then, all of a sudden, there's a crane with a camera hanging over our heads, and you're, like, 'Okayyyyyyy. But how are you gonna sell this? How are you gonna make it work?' And they ended up shooting it brilliantly, cutting it together, and it just all ended up working without me having to compromise my own personal morals.

It's interesting: I went 25 years without watching a single television show. I was one of those people, because I was so inside how a television show was made, if I would turn on somebody else's show, I would sit there and analyze it, like, 'Oh, so they had four hours in this location and had to get out and the number of set-ups, etc.'

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'm not an actor that tends to care. I don't ask 'Is this a close up? Is this a master? Is this a wide? What are you doing? If I look up and notice the camera I go 'Oh, it's a big one today, must be an IMAX.' And that's kinda it for me because it doesn't affect what I'm doing.

After 'The Blues Brothers,' I wanted to do a good musical number with real dancers and shoot it correctly.

I started playing around with GoPros on my own to get some cool footage. But it's actually become a big training tool for my team and me.

[I was filmed] against a blue screen [in the Star Wars]. All the rest came later, in Lucasland. They did have me take gun lessons, though. I went to the same guys who taught Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

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.

In 'Deadwood,' it was just extremely unaesthetic. They actually put underarm merkins on and covered me with dirt!

When I filmed 'Power Rangers,' almost everything was being assisted by a green screen, but it wasn't the same with 'Stranger Things.'

For movies, I usually do an entire book that has all kinds of things about what is happening at the time the movie is going on and try to get into what my character's going to be like, to try to get some consistency, because they shoot movies out of order.

What goes down on film is different to what you see with the naked eye.

There are a lot of similarities with film and TV, but also a lot of differences, especially in the way they film stuff.

One thing I learnt was that you don't have to spend all day shooting: you can get it done in half an hour if you're that talented as a cameraman.

When we were first approached with the idea to do videos, we said why not. We used the things that we do in our lives in the videos.

Doing the Muppet Show you forget about conventional filming.

The production value of YouTube videos is not there.

I was so used to documentary filming, where it's one take. You can't really say, 'Make that elephant charge again!' And you talk to the camera. With movie filming, you're talking to someone else.

The things that are hardest to shoot are the things where you want people just to feel very natural, and you want to do love scenes, and you want to do just kids hanging out and trying to get them to relax.

To shoot a decent fight, you need to cover all the different angles, and it ends up eating a lot of days.

'Shogun' was a mini-series, so even though it went on television, we filmed it like a movie.

I love the rehearsal, as long as it's not over-rehearsed. I love it when the actors can rehearse until we feel really comfortable, and then the crew come in and shoot it. I'm not especially a big fan of rehearsing with the crew and the crew rehearsing and, "Let's rehearse this tracking dolly shot 25 times until it's just right." Television has to be shot a certain way to have a certain look. And sometimes the tried-and-true method is the best.

We start with a rehearsal where the actors kind of bring what they think should be in the scene. But we film everything, and we use cuts of this first take, also.