Quotes & Sayings About Film Cameras

I don't use film cameras. I don't do visual effects the same way. We don't use miniature models; it's all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It's a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same. — James Cameron

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

If I may, I'd like to take a moment to praise Mark Zuckerberg's parents for not procreating sooner. Praise be to all that is holy that Facebook didn't exist when I was that age and the Internet then was but a Usenet group for Star Trek fans. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have grown up when cameras used actual film because the only thing that stood between infamy and me was the clerk who developed photos at Walgreens. Thank God for him. — Jen Lancaster

For Instagram, people use cameras ranging from high-end DSLRs, point-and-shoots, classic film cameras, and their smartphones. I personally like to use my iPhone because I know I will always have it with me. — Connor Franta

Cameras and lenses are simply tools to place our unique vision on film. Concentrate on equipment and you'll take technically good photographs. Concentrate on seeing the light's magic colors and your images will stir the soul. — Jack Dykinga

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

I'm the most experienced cinematographer in this medium, so there's no point in having that extra conversation in the middle of the loop. You're making the film in relation to what's happening now, and you can't really affect what's happening now. It's not like you're in control of anything in front of the camera. If you're calling yourself the director and you're not the cinematographer, I think you're kidding yourself. — David Douglas

I suppose this happens because we have cameras on our phones. Do we need that? It's not like ten years ago we were thinking, "I wish I could take a low-quality photo of my dessert and text it to someone who's not interested." Remember when photos were special? It was not that long ago. "It's school picture day! We better get Junior a haircut. We want him to look nice. Don't want to waste the time of that camera expert and that precious film. — Jim Gaffigan

I am against great themes and great subjects ... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact. — Jean Renoir

Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here for tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin. — Rick Moody

I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me. — Roger Deakins

The development of fast film allowed the subjects of our photographs to be caught unawares, beyond our or their control. But they are nevertheless caught; the camera holds the last lanyard of control we would forgo. — Stanley Cavell

Photographers do themselves a disservice by talking too much about the equipment they use. Consequently people don't take them seriously as creators in their own right. When people talk to writers about their work, they ask about their ideas and inspirations. When they talk to photographers, they ask about what cameras or film they use. That's wrong - as wrong as asking a writer what pencil and laptop he uses. — Peter Turnley

The camera cannot leave the man, but the man can leave the camera. It's in the style of documentary where you make an agreement between a camera and a man and say, "I'm going to film you now." — Tobias Lindholm

Life without kids is like a camera without film. — Dirk Benedict

One thing that is very different technically is that you don't get a lot of coverage in television. Not like you do on a film. I know we don't have time for separate set-ups, so I will design a scene where I'm hiding multiple cameras within that set-up. That way, if I don't have time to do five set-ups, I can do four cameras in one set-up. It's a different kind of approach for that. For the most part, a lot of television, in a visual sense, lacks time for the atmosphere and putting you in a place. — Len Wiseman

Film is like a personal diary, a notebook or a monologue by someone who tries to justify himself before a camera. — Jean-Luc Godard

I wanted the camera to actually observe the people who come from the outside to live inside a country, instead of fantasizing about them. Also, I wanted to say the sum of who we become is thanks to the people we meet. I wanted to make a positive film. — Danielle Arbid

I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that. — Rosie O'Donnell

I do films to be behind the camera, not in front of the camera. I'm sure I say very intimate things about myself in all my films, but it's better to say it not too directly, to be hidden behind a woman. — Francois Ozon

Small, portable digital cameras that exceed the performance of an off-the-shelf Nikon using 35mm slide film are further away from current reality than the proposed NASA manned Mars mission, although I expect both to happen sometime during my lifetime. — Galen Rowell

The truth is, unlike TV and film cameras, the theater stage doesn't add 10 pounds. — Sara Ramirez

In some ways any film that you do has an artificiality about it. Even when you're doing the most kitchen-sinky, gritty, realistic scene you've still got 50 people standing around watching you with cameras and lights and things. — Michael Sheen

I have equal parts film and digital cameras in my collection. I think that there are ways to Photoshop photos so that they look like you shot them on film, but is that as rewarding? It just depends on the person. — Dianna Agron

Growing up, my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn't know anything about cameras. I didn't know how to make a film and I obviously didn't have a special effects budget. I was a kid. So I was learning to draw to get down the stuff that was in my head, that I couldn't afford to actually do. — Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Photography is a very forgiving medium. Anybody that can afford film and a camera can make pictures. — Todd Walker

I was clear: "I don't want to play businessmen with bifocal glasses and cameras, so if you're going to give me an Asian bad guy to play, then I'm going to give you the baddest Asian bad guy you've ever seen, and you're not going to forget that I was in the film." — Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

I felt that film (Let It Be) was set up by Paul for Paul. That is one of the main reasons the Beatles ended. I can't speak for George, but I pretty damn well know we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul. After Brian died, that's what happened, that's what began to happen to us. The camera work was set up to show Paul and not anybody else. And that's how I felt about it. — John Lennon

I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand! — Warren Spector

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

A saucer flew right over (us), put down three landing gears, and landed out on the dry lakebed. (The cameramen) went out there with their cameras toward the UFO ... I had chance to hold (the film) up to the window. Good close-up shots. There was no doubt in my mind that it was made someplace other than on this earth. — Gordon Cooper

We had two cameras, so they could turn it on and shoot as much as we wanted. You don't have to worry about wasting money on film. A lot more takes are possible. — Marguerite Moreau

The Joke...Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. X2 cameras;variable length; black and white, silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton's 'audience-specific events,' two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the film's audience and project the resultant raster onto screen - the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film's involuted 'antinarrative' flow. Incandenza's first truly controversial project, Film & Kartridge Kulcher's Sperber credited it with 'unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-postsctructural film in terms of sheer annoyance. — David Foster Wallace

I love the quality, feel and history of film. I love the pictures of the giant cameras and the way it was. — David Lynch

Shooting digitally would not have been easier. Cameras are the same size. I always shoot on film unless I have a reason not to, which I haven't had yet. — Jaume Collet-Serra

I thought all I had to do was to buy a camera and become a film director. So when I left school I worked at a telephone company, which gave me the money to buy the basic equipment including the camera, the projector and the screen. — Jean-Pierre Jeunet

We had the guys from X Men 2 do the cameras. They had a 360 camera that would go from one car, up in the air and over to another car in a continuous shot while the film was still rolling, going 90 mph. — Jimmy Fallon

The traditional Hollywood system is pretty rigid, but the film scene in, say, South Africa is booming with a lot of possibilities. If you have the cameras and reasonable capital, you can put your film in theatres next to 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' A great example of that was Kagiso Lediga's film 'Blitz Patrole.' — Hasan Minhaj

It seemed like a hybrid of Spinal Tap, the British The Office, and something entirely original. Scenes would be blocked and rehearsed almost like a play, with entire scenes performed top to bottom many times. Two or three cameras would find the action and just follow the actors as they moved around. Actors often didn't know when they were on camera or where the cameras were. "Spy shots" lent a sense of intimacy to moments. Actors were allowed to look into the camera to show their reactions to things and spoke directly to the camera with "talking heads," used to further the story or display another side of what a character was feeling.15, 16 Camera operators were very close or very far away but a dynamic part of the action. We would shoot eight or nine pages in a twelve-hour day, which is about double what one shoots on a feature film. — Amy Poehler

I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom. — Agnes Varda

Without that discovery of the "moving photo," the world today would not be what it is: the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old: advertisements, television series); and secundo, the agent of worldwide indiscretion (cameras secretly filming political adversaries in compromising situations, immortalizing the pain of a half-naked woman laid out on a stretcher after a street bombing). It is true that film as art does also exist, but its significance is far more limited than that of film as technology, and its history is certainly shorter than that of any other art. — Milan Kundera

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

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. — Graydon Carter

I've always thought that the President could do so much here to help change images. If the President would go into a public bathroom in the Capitol, and have the TV cameras film him cleaning the toilets and saying 'Why not? Somebody's got to do it!' then that would do so much for the morale of the people who do the wonderful job of keeping the toilets clean. I mean, it is a wonderful thing that they're doing. — Andy Warhol

Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress's dead ends. It's the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people's behavior and shape their perceptions. That's why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light. — Nicholas Carr

When I photographed Marilyn Monroe, I mixed up my cameras - one had black-and-white film, the other color. I took many pictures. Only two color ones came out all right. My favorite picture of Marilyn hangs always on the wall in my office. It was taken on the little patio of her Hollywood house. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

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

I was so lucky to be working with amazing actors like Shia and Evan and James Buckley and Mads Mikkelsen and Rupert Grint and Til Schweiger and those guys, so you really want to make sure that they, that I don't have to shut off the camera because I'm running out of film or it becomes too expensive. — Fredrik Bond

I don't want to direct music videos at all. Any work I do with a camera I'd like to be for a film. — Giuseppe Andrews

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

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

I'm really into acquiring film paraphernalia - that's my hobby. I love old movie posters, cameras and film reels. — Sarah Gadon

I love my cameras. I love contact sheets. I love the visceral thing of film and I'm not positive that I can replicate my lighting digitally. My assistants tell me I can, but, just stubborn I guess. — Carol Friedman

I agreed to film after my rookie year in Golden State. I was more used to cameras and felt that my journey to the NBA was a story worth sharing. Little did we know how much bigger the platform and documentary would become after Linsanity. — Jeremy Lin

The camera can film my face but until it captures my soul, you don't have a movie, — Al Pacino

People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal. — Rebecca McNutt

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

Pretty early on in making the first movie I realized that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like by that time I just found my niche, like this is what I was supposed to be doing. So I completely submerged myself into the world of watching movies, making my own movies, buying video cameras and lights. When I wasn't making a movie, I was making my own movies. When I wasn't making movies, I was watching movies. I was going back and studying film and looking back at guys that were perceived as great guys that I can identify with. It just became my life. — Mark Wahlberg

I did a film called 'Floating' early on that had a scene which was similar to a real-life situation I was in at the time. It involved me having a conversation with my father, who was dying. It was close to home and it made me realise acting wasn't just making faces for the cameras, it was a real art form. — Norman Reedus

I lived through being pooh-poohed by fine art galleries, saying, "Digital is going to destroy the meaning behind photos." The motion side, the moment all of the cameras come alive with that motion, it was like a dream come true. It enables people to economically experiment with film. — Russell James

Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed he had proved beyond doubt that 'it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.' His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that 'if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn't need elevators. — Zachary M. Schrag

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That's the only way they are going to find themselves. They can't do it in their heads - they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film. — Berenice Abbott

You cannot do everything you want with the 3D camera, it's too big, and the digital quality of those cameras is a little bit limiting. With film, you have a lot more subtly, like with highlights and color. In terms of sharpness they (both formats) are very close; but in terms of nuance, of color and contrast, film is far superior. — Michel Gondry

I'd like to use IMAX. The problem with IMAX is that it's a very loud camera. It's a very unreliable camera. Only so much film can be in the camera. You can't really do intimate scenes with it. — J.J. Abrams

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

I heard the new film, 'Tangerine,' was filmed entirely on iPhones. No cameras were involved! — D. A. Pennebaker

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn't care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn't just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life's best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes. — Rebecca McNutt

Unlike regular digital or film cameras, which can only record a scene in two dimensions, light field cameras capture all of the light rays traveling in every direction through a scene. This means that some aspects of a picture can be manipulated after the fact. — Ren Ng

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

If I hope to survive, I have to acknowledge the natural selection that goes on when film stocks and cameras are eliminated from the world. And film viewers won't want to watch the same thing over and over again from me. — Guy Maddin

There's plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film-I don't think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that's going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I'm color-blind. — William Eggleston

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

I was on the yearbook staff, so I would take out film cameras and Nikons and take photos around school and at sporting events and things like that. We had a darkroom as well. I just loved it. I also saved up for a video camera to video my friends and cut and paste the videos together and I gave them to all of my friends for graduation. — Dianna Agron

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

Go home, pick up your video camera, and make a film. — James Cameron

At some level, you've got to have the ability to - especially in film and in front of the camera, you got to have the ability to drop into character and close off the entire crew and the camera and everything else. — Denis Leary

Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so. — Rebecca McNutt