Gordon Willis Quotes

#1. I got fired from a movie that ended up being called 'Windows,' which Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, directed. I got fired because he refused to cast Meryl Streep, who at the time was at Yale. I told him I thought he was an idiot, and he fired me.

Scott Rudin

#2. A huge problem in movies or with people who work on movies is that two people can look at the same thing but they don't necessarily see the same thing.

Gordon Willis

#3. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#4. Grips and electricians have done more to help me shoot good movies than any other craft.

Gordon Willis

#5. A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist - moving an audience through a movie ... making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark.

Gordon Willis

#6. I hate when somebody says, "This may not work." You'll never get anywhere with that. I've pushed a lot of people out of my way - I don't mean physically - over them being afraid something isn't going to work.

Gordon Willis

#7. A werewolf isn't supposed to have parents." Brenda said, grumbling. "They're not supposed to have mothers. How am I supposed to shoot you now, knowing it'll upset that really nice woman?

Carrie Vaughn

#8. This was not a fairy tale, this was the real, the adult world in which frogs did not
address princesses, and the only messages were the ones that people sent

Ian McEwan

#9. There are a lot of cameramen but not so many photographers. And a lot of cameramen attack from a technical approach without much imagination. They look, but they don't see.

Gordon Willis

#10. Don't get simple mixed up with simplistic.

Gordon Willis

#11. If you take a sophisticated idea, reduce it to the simplest possible terms so that it's accessible to everybody, and don't get simple mixed up with simplistic, it's how you mount and present something that makes it engaging.

Gordon Willis

#12. All names have been omitted to prevent undeserved infamy...

Elle

#13. Zooms are lazy closeups. And too many people hang their hats on video assist; it's a way to avoid too much. Video assist helps people dissociate from the scene that they are directing. Pretty soon the director will be directing all the way from his apartment.

Gordon Willis

#14. Only with our government are you given a certificate at birth, a license at marriage, and a bill at death.

Jennifer Dunn

#15. If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.

Gertrude Stein

#16. We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness.

Richard Rohr

#17. The lack of perfection, that's the hardest quality of all, because you're fighting your instincts. You're trained to want to do things perfectly.

Gordon Willis

#18. The thing about film is that your eye is selective. Film isn't. You have to make film do what you want. Simply photographing something doesn't do it. You have to know how to apply light and know what it does on film.

Gordon Willis

#19. Look, if you have somebody who doesn't have health insurance, who doesn't have a doctor or dentist, and in order to deal with their cold or flu or dental problem, they go to an emergency room - in general, that visit will cost ten times more than walking into a community health center.

Bernie Sanders

#20. It is ironic how the years change you and yet you remain the same.

Preeti Shenoy

#21. It turns out that there is something more magnificent than nature. It's love.

Ben Harper

#22. When you put a piece of bread into your mouth, chew only your bread and not your projects, worries, fears, or anger.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#23. I'm a great believer in relativity when making movies. Relativity, in my mind, meaning "Light to dark, big to small, good to bad." You visually embrace these things to enhance transitions and instantly paint environments and moods.

Gordon Willis

#24. Complexity is not good. People don't understand the elegance of simplicity.

Gordon Willis

#25. I don't really like directing. I've had a good relationship with actors, but I can do what I do and back off. I don't want that much romancing. I don't want them to call me up at two in the morning saying, 'I don't know who I am.

Gordon Willis

#26. I'm a minimalist. I see things in simple ways ... It's human nature to define complexity as better. Well, it's not.

Gordon Willis

#27. Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.

Gordon Willis

#28. If there wasn't The Beach Boys and there wasn't music, I wouldn't even talk to them. But through the music I fell in love with my brothers.

Dennis Wilson