Film Camera Quotes

#1. Whenever there's a camera around, a video or film camera, it's a great deal harder for those in power to bury the story.

Peter Gabriel

#2. I don't remember the first picture I took, but I actually found a picture of myself on a trip back to my old family home in Malaysia. I'm five years old, sitting on the floor with the family camera in my hand. It was a film camera - not a DSLR - with a fixed lens and a nice manual zoom.

Ren Ng

#3. I don't think there is any advantage to digital unless it's in a case like Slumdog Millionaire, where you have to get a shot and a big bulky film camera is out of the question.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#4. I grew up in the '60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn't that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

Abel Ferrara

#5. I like the film camera better because the film is still one hundred times better than any digital image at the moment. So, there are certain movies that you can't really do digitally.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#6. The film camera's ability to physically move through space, not zoom through space - every time we have a video camera the movement is through zoom; every time we have a film camera it is a physical movement.

Atom Egoyan

#7. Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital. 3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking.

Ren Ng

#8. Film was something that I didn't see as a step up from music videos, though obviously, music videos, the fact that you work with a crew and a film camera, are the closest to film I've ever been. That is the only schooling I've ever had.

Anton Corbijn

#9. I've always been intimidated by the technicalities of taking photos, especially with a film camera - not just a point and shoot.

Taylor Kitsch

#10. I always have traveled with a camera throughout my life, but I always had my old 35mm film camera. When I was training to go into space, the only equipment there was a digital camera. I went through a fast-track class on Earth. It actually was fun, though I'm basically a dinosaur with computers.

Guy Laliberte

#11. I think that film is still an artform and it doesn't really matter if you're using a digital camera or a film camera.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#12. I found my father's Super8mm film camera when I was around eight years old and started shooting with it. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but that's really where my filmmaking began.

Gabriel Campisi

#13. Acting's all about the confidence you exude, especially on film. I mean, nervousness isn't attractive in anyone, but a film camera will seek it out and punish you.

John C. Reilly

#14. I started out with this dream of being a director and doing cinematography and bought my first film camera at 15.

James Brolin

#15. When I got cast in 'Rocky IV,' I had never seen a film camera before. And here I was in this boxing movie.

Dolph Lundgren

#16. I'm working on bringing the instant film camera back as part of the future.

Lady Gaga

#17. I only shoot on film. I like the quality, the grain and the imperfections. It offers me something much more rewarding than any digital camera can give me. I believe the extra expense is worth it.

Guy Berryman

#18. Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful - that's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.

Helen McCrory

#19. Of course, it's wonderful to film any period piece - but especially 'Foyle's War' because the art direction is so imaginative and yet at the same time so real. You can open a drawer on set, and even though the camera never sees what's inside, it'll be filled with genuine 1940s documents.

Honeysuckle Weeks

#20. If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.

Brad Dourif

#21. I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

Tamra Davis

#22. Acting in 'Command & Conquer 3' called for me to interact with the player and to look directly into the camera, which is a big no no when filming for TV or film.

Grace Park

#23. One of the best things - and something I'm grateful for every time I walk onto a film set - is my six and a half years on Dawson's Creek and the experience it afforded me in how to get comfortable with the camera.

Michelle Williams

#24. I remember my very first audition for a film. I was in Seattle. They were taping the session, and I just went crazy. The director finally said, 'Zoe, what are you doing? The camera's right here. Just talk to me.' And it took that director saying that to me to change everything.

Zoe McLellan

#25. You get to the middle of a take that's going really well and the camera will run out of film. They have to stop you, apologize and then you've got to get things going all over again.

David Morse

#26. 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.

Jack Huston

#27. If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!

Werner Herzog

#28. I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

Ruth Ozeki

#29. The whole thrust in my life right now is spinning my assignments around and making them work in a more personal way ( ... ) I wanted to go back and do the original thing: one camera, one lens, one film. You really have to put yourself in a position of danger to be creative.

David Alan Harvey

#30. I usually befriend the camera department very early on in the film and drive them nuts. I'm constantly bombarding them with questions and going through the stills photography. A film set is a great place for me and I love it.

Eric Bana

#31. Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

Stanley Kubrick

#32. For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

Tom Bissell

#33. 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.

Hunter S. Thompson

#34. You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating.

Thom Powers

#35. When I am making a film, I know what to do in front of a camera. What frightens me are the scenes with dialogue. Sometime they really want me to speak perfectly and I don't like that.

Jackie Chan

#36. I was so besotted with '8½' that, when it was on TV, I used to take pictures with my 35-mm. camera of the frames of the film. That was the first time I'd ever really seen Italians on screen.

David Chase

#37. I took myself out of the business to study film at NYU and the School of Visual Arts. I grew up on movie sets and was fascinated with the camera and behind-the-scenes work. I felt it would help my career as an actor if I knew all aspects of film.

Devin Ratray

#38. I've dealt with a few method actors, and I don't know if should say this, but I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I think it's film acting and you just have to be on when the camera is rolling.

Natalie Portman

#39. I like the idea of having a film that is choreographic in all its aspects, not only in the dancing scenes, but also in the way the camera and the characters move in order to have that feeling that it's always musical.

Pascal Chaumeil

#40. A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.

Robert Bresson

#41. I even agree with the new digital ways of filmmaking, where you don't even have physical film in the camera, but to be honest, I wouldn't want to use it.

J. Lee Thompson

#42. Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.

Jonas Mekas

#43. With a camera, a microphone, and sufficient cash, you, too, can craft your own version of the world and emblazon it with a premium of fear over facts. (Be warned though: Paranoid schizophrenia makes for compelling film, but it's no way of life.)

David T. Hardy

#44. There are times when you're working with film people when you have to say, 'If the camera were on you, what you're doing would be perfect'.

Anna D. Shapiro

#45. Photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself ...

Rebecca McNutt

#46. LUCY and Desi. Lucy and Ricky. As far as the public knew, the private life of the Arnazes closely resembled that of the Ricardos on the TV screen; a camera crew just dropped by once a week to film a half hour of slapstick and tender kisses.

Warren G. Harris

#47. I like the days when all the filmmakers had was a film roll, a camera and a gangster. The Mack Sennett comedies were all like that. They'd create little teams to go out and shoot films.

Michel Gondry

#48. Film and theater are about misdirection and making the audience see something. I find it interesting. One of the things we do in 'True Blood' is shoot all of our stunts in camera. Instead of doing some kind of visual effect, we try to make it happen.

Stephen Moyer

#49. There's so much more freedom in film as far as subject matter and what can be said. And then, also, the process is different because there's more time. On movies there's just so much freedom and space to explore in front of the camera.

Dave Franco

#50. I approach film no differently than I approach a role. I want to make sure the movie is right, the characters are right, I can really bring something to it as a visionary, a storyteller. It's great to point a camera, but can you tell a story?

Larenz Tate

#51. Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.

Edwin Land

#52. Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera.

Jean-Luc Godard

#53. In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#54. The '80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn't integrate their film and theater departments - so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn't talk to the actors.

Eric Stoltz

#55. Photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated - as though it had created itself.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#56. I don't rehearse with my actors ... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on ... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed ... so you film reactions; you don't create them.

Ira Sachs

#57. There is no right or wrong angle for something. The idea of putting the camera in an unfamiliar position is simply to do with film language. Sometimes it is spectacular, sometimes it is ugly, sometimes it is uninteresting.

Steve McQueen

#58. Life came in and put me in front of the camera before I could really make a decision, but I think I probably would have gravitated to film.

Elisabeth Rohm

#59. Most people stiffen with self-consciousness when they pose for a photograph. Lighting and fine camera equipment are useless if the photographer cannot make them drop the mask, at least for a moment, so he can capture on his film their real, undistorted personality and character.

Philippe Halsman

#60. I dress according to the requirement of the film, as a true actor. Off the camera, I'm just me. I have my preferences and my personal style. Before I step out, I look into the mirror just to confirm that my style is intact. Beyond this, it doesn't matter.

Vidya Balan

#61. I've learned so much from just being in film industry. I definitely want to stay in front of the camera and learn more from as many people as I can. Somewhere down the line, writing, directing and producing would be fantastic.

Nico Tortorella

#62. With film acting, and often when the camera comes very close, you just have to think about something and the camera will pick it up.

Ruth Wilson

#63. I have spent too much time with my eye glued to the viewfinder and ended up missing both the image of the mind and that on film.

Doug Peacock

#64. On Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in a 1948 film: Olivier's idea of introspection was to hood his eyes, dentalize his consonants and let the camera circle his blondined head like a sparrow looking for a place to deposit its droppings.

Robert Brustein

#65. I'm into capturing the moment. Sometimes, I'll rip the camera out of my assistant's hands and he'll be shouting, But there's no film in the camera! and I think, Never mind! Let's go.

Ellen Von Unwerth

#66. Even back in the '90s, I shot certain things on something that wasn't digital then, but it was on VHS with a smaller camera and we would up it to film.

Barry Levinson

#67. Photography is a very forgiving medium. Anybody that can afford film and a camera can make pictures.

Todd Walker

#68. The truth is, working on single camera, show or film, you have no life. You work 60-80 hours a week. You're up before your kid gets up, and you're home when they go to sleep.

Jaime Pressly

#69. 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.

David Walliams

#70. My first experience with film was through a still camera. I would sit, very much against my will, with my father in the game reserve, watching some elephant or rhino or whatever, through a 400 millimeter lens and wait, and waiting and waiting.

Gavid Hood

#71. Oh yeah - I watched Knife in the Water, saw the shot, and repeated it. But even if I hadn't seen that film, inevitably the camera would've ended up on top of that mast, I mean if you think of it there are only so many dynamic shots on a boat.

Phillip Noyce

#72. I love the idea I can go off with a single camera and a few rolls of film unencumbered ... I was not interested in the illusion of reality, I wanted to get close to what was happening.

Eve Arnold

#73. THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye.

Steven Jay Schneider

#74. 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.

William Boyd

#75. It's an incredible privilege for an actor to look into the camera. It's like looking right into the heart of the film, and you can't take that lightly.

Emily Watson

#76. One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.

Oliver Stone

#77. A lot of biopics to me feel very much like someone is standing in front of the camera and is reading a Wikipedia page to you, like someone is reciting event. Did you know this happened? Did you know that happened? But Alan Turing's life deserved a sort of passionate film, and an exciting film.

Graham Moore

#78. I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.

Beau Bridges

#79. In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.

Peter Greenaway

#80. Because I trained in theater, I always leave a film shoot feeling like I haven't done anything, like I just sat in front of the camera and whispered, essentially.

Hayley Atwell

#81. I'm a film rat. I love being in front of a camera. I love being behind a camera. I love talking to the director. I love talking film.

Jim Caviezel

#82. I carry a disposable camera. It takes me back to my childhood, when you had to develop your film and wait to see what pictures you got.

Christa B. Allen

#83. I'm staying with film, and with silver prints, and no Photoshop. That's the way I learned photography: You make your picture in the camera. Now, so much is made in the computer ... I'm not anti-digital; I just think, for me, film works better.

Mary Ellen Mark

#84. My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

Nikki Sixx

#85. 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.

Darren Aronofsky

#86. The helicopter was a U.S. Navy helicopter. There were no civilian helicopters available to film companies, so they just made some stuff out of two-by-four wood. And I would straddle a two-by-four out from the helicopter with a camera and what we call a high hat, which is a low metal stand.

Haskell Wexler

#87. When I watch a film I get swept away. I don't really watch the camera.

William H. Macy

#88. He [Andy warhol] went out every evening to five or six parties with a tape recorder in one pocket and a camera with extra film and batteries in the other pocket, constantly recording and photographing everyone he came across.

Bob Colacello

#89. When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#90. Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.

Louise Fletcher

#91. The camera is not your eye, and it's not the eye of the audience. I don't think it's my eye, either. It belongs to the film.

Claire Denis

#92. To be honest, I've always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad's Super 8 camera. In my mind, it's all one big continuum of filmmaking and I've never changed.

Christopher J. Nolan

#93. A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.

Eddie Redmayne

#94. When I start a film, I can sort of shut my eyes, sit somewhere quiet and imagine the movie finished. I can imagine the camera angles, I can even imagine the type of music. Without knowing the tune, I can imagine the type of music it needs to be.

Peter Jackson

#95. I really think music and movement - dance, you know - and literature inform my visuals. I think film is also based in dance. The relationship between me, the camera and the actor is always a dance.

Christopher Doyle

#96. It's one thing to put on your nation's uniform to give your life for your country. But to dress up in black-market khakis and head into battle in a borrowed bush hat, armed only with a Nikon camera, 10 rolls of film and notebook, is definitely another thing.

Peter Arnett

#97. If I could film, we'd film every episode of 'Doctor Who' in New York. I have an affinity with the city. It has some wonderful locations and it is devastatingly vast and huge. Central Park looks amazing on camera.

Matt Smith

#98. When I made my first film, I had hardly ever seen a camera before, and I was a young man when I arrived in Paris from the suburbs. At the time, I didn't talk much. I was very shy, so the bluff served me. I was telling people that I had no money, and that I knew how to make films, but I had no proof.

Leos Carax

#99. People who are good at film have a relationship with the camera.

Fiona Shaw

#100. After I did nine years of a television series, I didn't want to do anything really that involved going to a set and being in front of a camera for quite a while. And when I did start to want to do things, I wanted to focus more on film.

Gillian Anderson