I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.
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.
Every street in London has a camera, and if you ever travel up the M4, it feels as if George Orwell should be your chauffeur.
Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.
You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.
A neighborhood friend showed me how it was possible to go to a camera shop and pick up chemicals for pennies... literally... and develop your own film and make prints.
I suffer from stage fright, so I blabber on stage and stop midway through my performances. I cannot even write a cheque, as it makes me nervous. Being around people makes me nervous. But I'm very comfortable in front of the camera, and this I realised many films later.
I learned how to make an endoscope using a Swiss Army Knife, a cell phone camera, cell phone, and chewing gum.
It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it's like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I'm not fighting. I don't have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.
In Hong Kong, particularly, we craft this art for decades. The action choreographer actually is the action director. He takes over and he choreographs with - by himself or with his team, and place the camera where he feels cinematic effect to bring out that choreography.
A lot of the time with an independent production, you go onto the set, and you rehearse it in front of the crew, and at that point, the cinematographer takes over. You start accommodating the camera instead of the camera accommodating you.
I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense - I want the director to see what I'm trying to do.
One thing I hate in movies is when the camera starts circling around the characters. I find that totally fake.
The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.
My parents used to talk about Sergio Leone films a lot. And I got really into them. I love Clint Eastwood. I love the camera angles. I love the music.
Actors' performances in films are enhanced in a million different ways, down to the choice of camera shot by the director - whether it's in slow motion or whether it's quick cut - or... the choice of music behind the close-up or the costume that you're wearing or the makeup.
Tak Fujimoto and I, when we started getting enough of a budget where we could afford the right lenses - 'cause we started out doing low-budget pictures together - we started experimenting with this subjective camera thing. And we kind of fell in love with the idea of using that as our close-up.
I was a highlight coordinator. My job was to go in and watch games, watch and type. Basically every time the camera frame changed, I had to log it as something: 'Emmitt Smith rushed for 4 yards... Close-up of Jimmy Johnson on the sidelines... 37-yard field goal.'
There's a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What's the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it's exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That's really cool. That's the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.
I developed my camera system, called the Medusa, jointly with a colleague down in Australia as a method of exploring the ocean unobtrusively. The critical thing was that we didn't use white light, which I believe has been scaring the animals away.
