On Cinematography

Less light is always preferable. I don’t like the set looking like a supermarket. Even if the set is a supermarket.

Great light is simple light. Naturalistic light is simple and beautiful. Just look around you.

Modern, smaller, digital cameras are dictating their own aesthetic. The fashion for shooting with two cameras, on long lenses, ‘crossing the line’ and ignoring the 100 year old grammar of filmmaking, has created a new, anarchic energy born of the MTV age.

Once upon a time film stock was very expensive to buy and process. Also the camera was a complicated, technical beast about which few understood its mysteries. Consequently filmmaking was the domain of a privileged few. Now digital cameras are so cheap and so simple a child can operate one — and there’s no film. It’s free! Anyone can tell their stories.