Emmanuel Lubezki
When you're shooting with long lenses, even if you're shooting a close-up, you feel the air, the distance between the camera and the subject.
For each movie that I do, I like to find a specific language to tell the specific story.
I think the audience doesn't know a movie's lit, but they feel it. Because you've walked in a forest many times, or in a park, so you know how it looks. When you start lighting, subconsciously you know there is something that is absolutely wrong.
'Little Princess' was the first big movie that I did in America with big stages where we had kind of a different schedule to work. We had a great production designer, Bo Welch, and we had time to think about the movie in pre-production.
A normal day of working in Burbank is 14 hours, sometimes more. On 'The Revenant' sometimes it was eight hours, but we were shooting only five. So they were short days, but they were very strenuous because of the weather. And it was very dark.
I have two daughters, and they grew up and wanted to get into Instagram, and I didn't know anything about social media. I started it to learn about what they were starting to do and how they communicate with their friends. I opened an account. Very fast, in a few hours, I realized that I actually liked it.
I have a very healthy dream life. I dream a lot many, many, many nights a week. When I'm shooting, it's even more - I don't know if it has to do with stress or with creation.
I was able to shoot a movie like 'Tree of Life' because I had done 'Y Tu Mama Tambien.' The camera needed to capture that sense of freedom and joy and life you have when you're young.
On 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' we started exploring shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors, and there are no cuts, and you feel like you're there.
The dynamic range of the digital camera is pretty crappy compared to film, but now film is not great because the labs have closed. It's going to hurt a lot of the movies that we did in this gap because I think they are going to look very old very soon.
The most important thing in imaging for me is the dynamic range. The dynamic range means the tones that you can capture from highlights to dark and the bits, the depth of color that you can capture.
I would love if film doesn't disappear, if we can have film forever so we would have all these brushes, all these possibilities available.
I'm very attracted to directors who want to experiment. The thing that attracts me the most are people who are trying find a language that is correct for their film, for that specific film.
The more tools we have directors and cinematographers will be able to express more and create different worlds and feelings. It's like having more instruments in an orchestra.
I can tell you that going to the Oscars is not as exciting as people think, at least for me.
I did sound for a number of years, so I know the pain of the sound mixer on a set where everybody was talking.
The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.
I don't miss film projecting. I always hated it.
Instead of trying to modify what nature brought us, we embraced it.Collection: Trying
The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater, and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative. Everything feels less rehearsed. It’s more experimental than classical.Collection: Narrative
What you don't want is to repeat a formula over and over or impose a formula to a movie that...when you impose yourself and you impose a formula and you're not open to explore and to find what is right for the movie, I think you're doing a disservice to the story and what you're trying to express.Collection: Thinking
Every time you start a movie is to explore with a director and if you can with the actors and with the other collaborators and try to figure out what's the best way to tell the specific story.Collection: Trying
I see an incredible abuse of close-ups in many films these days. Why is that?Collection: Abuse
If I'm collaborating with an artist I like to give them my point of view and if they don't want to take any of my recommendations it's fine, but it's hard otherwise.Collection: Artist