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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.