Vilmos Zsigmond Quotes
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Using film was so much easier than the digital technology of today. But digital is still at the beginning of what it can be and they'll be fixing all those problems. It's just too complicated - negatives, tinting, flashing - it's a whole new system that takes a lot of time. Of course, it's not as physical. Even the editing. You used to feed a piece of celluloid into an editor. [Digital] is not expensive and that is an advantage, but I must say that I don't love it.
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I love the Dutch impressionists - Vermeer, Rembrandt. What they were able to do with light was astonishing. As for photographers, I think mostly of the Hungarians: Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jozsef Pesci. In fact, I have one of his photographs hanging in my house.
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I should mention Vittorio Storaro, who was Bernardo Bertolucci's cinematographer. You watch those films and they are exceptional.
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I like to work with talented people, I must say that. That's my weakness. I really like to work with good directors. That doesn't mean I don't like to work with starting up young directors, that's fun also.
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The studios are never going to make $200 million a picture with those types of movies. It's not familiar to them, and it's not a model that can necessarily be sustained. Now, if they go back to making movies about people ... well, I hope they do that.
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I really like to work with people who know a lot, but they also give me space so I can add something to the movie.
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Mexican cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio Fernandez were students of both Sergei Eisenstein and Toland. Their exteriors and lighting were gorgeous. And the films Ingmar Bergman did with Sven Nykvist were exceptional.
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When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.
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European films had art. And it was easy to make a European film. They didn't come from the studio system, they weren't shot in sound studios, and that's a good thing, because in the studio system those movies would never have had a chance. And since we were coming from Europe, it was natural for us to use that simple style. Small budgets, less equipment, that was just how it was.
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Some movies are what I would call murky. Just because it's murky doesn't make it artistic. It makes it hard to see.
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You always like to be the collaborator. I don't want to take over the movie, because if I want to do that, I should really become a director because then you have the control of everything, basically. I'm very happy to just be the visual part of it, doing the visual part of the movie.
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In a period piece, particularly a fantasy, the lighting is your own choice, the lenses are your own choice. It's really a great thing for a cinematographer to do. Everything is open for you. You can even be more creative and you can use more shadows than usual.
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I think film is about images. Cinema needs good images. I think that if you don’t have good images, it’s not going to be a good film. I think all films should be really visual.
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If you use hand-held techniques just to make the film stylish I think it's wrong.
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I love to make movies about young people - young scientists that are inventing things and all the writing they did was very funny and very true.
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With television, it's difficult to do some things. You have to shoot so many minutes a day, so you always have to be prepared or you won't be able to complete the number of pages that you have scheduled for that day.
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You make a film for a million dollars and then it costs $10 million to sell it. That's the problem at the moment with independent filmmaking: You can make it cheap and then there's no money to market it.
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Even in manipulating the images, I would like to do my dailies in a digital way because you can do so many things in that stage that I cannot do in real photography.
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I'm not really satisfied with the technology today. Using film was so much easier than the digital technology of today. But digital is still at the beginning of what it can be and they'll be fixing all those problems.
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When we came to America, the movies here needed a "new wave." European films looked totally different than American movies, which were these lush, glossy pictures with this elaborate production design.
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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.
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I'm always looking in the lighting to tell the story in a different way than it actually looks in real life because it's, for me, more contrast sometimes has to mean it's softer than normal.
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I think all cinematographers, at least most of them, would love to do everything on location because you cannot cheat on location. It's there, it's part of the story usually. You have to deal with the elements. You have the sunshine, you have rain, you have fog - it really makes you work harder to try to match things during the day to make it look like it was shot within five minutes, movie time.
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There are, of course, many, many, many good cinematographers and unfortunately they don't work as much as many of those people who do those crazy, stupid movies.
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Hayden [Sterling] told me that he was thrilled about the way he moved around the set, that wherever he would go, there would be lighting. He didn't think about his marks because they were set in the only places he could move.
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There are a lot of directors out there that don't like to deal with actors, I think. Many of them have said something like, in the future they will actually manipulate the actors on their computers. But don't believe all this.
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Jack [Nicholson] really knows about the camera. He's one of the directors who likes to play with the camera. He'll change things around, play with lighting, things like that. He'll even spend hours on the set-up for an insert shot. He's an interested person who gets involved in all the aspects of the films he is making.
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If you do not bother to take the time to compose and to light properly, then you end up with something almost less than reality. You end up without the soul, the heart, the art of the moment.
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I like to say that lighting is about taking the light away. I often like to use the shadows more than the light.
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You can't just stick with what you know, you have to evolve.
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