I don't like to move the camera that much anyway.
My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.
Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.
If I had to give advice to other photographers, I would first suggest quickly getting over the camera equipment questions. In my humble opinion, the make and format of a camera is ultimately low on the priority scale when it comes to making pictures.
Many times I've sat with a camera and another actor and seen all their fears and insecurities and struggles. You want to support them and help them as much as you can.
The camera basically is a license to explore.
I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
When I'm working behind a camera, I feel like I'm trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.
Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon.
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Sometimes you're not always on or at your best, especially during auditions. So if you go in and you don't nail it, even if they're like, 'We don't need to see you again,' get a friend, get a video camera, and film you doing the stuff again.
George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.
I couldn't be more thankful to get my start on a soap opera. It was the hardest job I ever had. Got to practice in front of the camera, like, every day.
In the '50s, I was traveling alone all over Mindanao, Basilan, all the way to Tawi-Tawi with just a camera and a notebook. I always stayed in the houses of Moros.
When I was young and it was someone's birthday, I didn't have the money to buy nice presents so I would take my mom's camera and make a movie parody for whoever's birthday it was. When I'd show it them, they'd die laughing. That reaction was a high for me, and I loved that feeling.
Take your camera off automatic. You are the photographer.
My mom had a Canon AE1 camera and I read the manual and that's basically how I became a photographer. I was in the Baltimore punk scene. I knew it was a special time, so I went out and documented that whole era. I was the only person to really do it of my friends in real black and white, beautiful portraits.
There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
I get very close to people when I'm shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob's office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.
If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.