- [on new film technologies] I am half engineer and I like all these technical challenges. With our craft, you can have great Ideas but you have to know how to achieve them from a technical point of view. I like to push things as much as possible. I like to try new things that weren't tried before. On Francis' [Francis Ford Coppola] films, we were pioneers on so many different levels. (...) To me, all the new tools are great, the more the better. There are so many things you weren't able to do before and what's most important is doing something new and different, something never done before - to do a sequel or something in the same way using the same tools would be a nightmare. (...) You know the old saying : "Don't study to be a doctor - you'll have to keep learning your whole life." Well, that's the same for cinematographers. We have to keep learning something new every day, continually, your whole life because every day there is a new toy, a new piece of equipment coming out - we just have to learn how to use it. [2013]
- [on the emotional effects of visuals] I try to think of everything. There's an amazing book called "Art and Visual Perception," written by Rudolf Arnheim. Arnheim talks about the history of art and images, and the things you can do to manipulate or channel the audience's feelings or reactions with the meaning of a certain color or contrast, or a certain diagonal. I might not be consciously thinking of these things, but it's somewhere inside me. You're also working with a certain set and a certain scene, so it's finding a balance. [2012]
- [on still photography] I have 12 still cameras, and I'm shooting still photos everywhere, especially when I'm starting a new project. One reason I don't have a really competitive digital still camera is the lack of format. I can shoot any format, including panoramic with Hasselblad two-frame 35mm. There are so many things you can do, and history has developed so many formats. [2012]
- [on studying cinematography] The program is now 3 years, but when I did it, it was 4. It's an interesting system, the same as most other Eastern European countries. It's a combination of the French system and the Russian system, where there are a limited number of places, but everything is pretty much paid for. You need to pass exams in the history of art, and you must be able to analyze a painting. We shot a lot of black and white in the first two years, and processing at the school. We were shooting, and then running to the basement and waiting for the negatives to come out. All these things helped our education a lot, I think. We did six or seven short films in 16mm and 35mm. There is emphasis on composition, color and the history of painting, which is definitely very helpful. [2012]
- [shooting The Master (2012) on 65mm] There was a long prep and testing period to figure out the format and the aspect ratio. I'm in love with still photographs. In the story, Freddie works in a portrait studio, so there are still photography elements in the story. We looked at what kind of format was used in that period, after World War II. Paul [Paul Thomas Anderson] had the idea to try a larger format, and it blended pretty well, because if you think of the most iconic still photography from that period, you think of really shallow depth of field. For example, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima was photographed on a Speed Graphic 4X5. So all your memories and references for that time are related to a large format negative. I loved that idea of trying a larger format than 35mm. I've done a lot of still photography on medium formats. We actually tested VistaVision, and it was interesting, but we had to struggle with it. We knew that Panavision had a bunch of the 65mm cameras, so that was the next test. And then, we went even further with the 65mm 8-perf, but for a variety of reason that wasn't feasible. At first the plan was to use 65mm for the portraits, maybe about 20% of the movie. But every shot that came from the 65mm negative was so amazing. After a week or two of shooting, we switched and ended up shooting 85% of the movie on 65mm, and the rest on 35mm. [2012]
- [on budget and time] I did three films with Francis [Francis Ford Coppola], all with pretty small budgets, first in Romania, then in Argentina, then in Napa [Napa County, California, USA]. We spent two years in Argentina making Tetro (2009) and we didn't have a lot of toys, but we had so much time to make the film the way Francis wanted to. When I was on The Master (2012), we had all the toys in the world, but there was such huge pressure on the amount of time we had to shoot. When you get everything you want, you realize what is most important is time. [2013]
- [on cinema's evolution] It's interesting how things are evolving. Francis [Francis Ford Coppola] has a 1912 Pathé crank camera. One day we were fooling around in Napa and I asked him if I could try it. I was shooting landscapes in Napa Valley with a 1912 hand-cranked camera and VISION3 film stock. It looks so amazing. That camera is like the beginning of everything. I do believe that the more choices we have, the better. [2012]
- In Hollywood, you can find everything - big budget productions and small artistic projects. I enjoy doing both. [2013]
- When students ask me how to start a career, I still recommend being an assistant on films because that will teach you so much more than any film school. I worked as camera assistant, an electrician and a stills photographer, and I learned how each position in the crew is important and how to move certain things fast in order to leave time for other things. [2013]
- [on his father Mihai Mãlaimare] My father started really young, at 27 years of age, he had a pretty big TV show in Romania. He then worked as an actor and director, but wanted to do something more than classical theatre, so when he was 30, he went to Paris to study mime with Jacques Lecoq for a few years. He started his own pantomime shows and started a theatre of mime and body expression. The way he directed his theatre shows influenced me a lot. He was in a festival competing with Marcel Marceau, doing "The Overcoat", by Nikolay Gogol and I remember there were 180 light changes. I was 15 then and just starting to play with stills and a VHS camera and I was shooting his theatre shows. That one stuck with me because there were so many light changes, I remember the light was so beautiful. It was such a tiny space and I realized how much you could do just by changing the light. [2013]
- [on The Hate U Give (2018)] One of my first discussions with George [director George Tillman Jr.] was making these two worlds as different as possible, and it felt right to have the private school cooler and to give the Garden Heights neighborhood a warmer palette. We were helped by the [Atlanta] locations, because most of the the schools we scouted had a similar look: a lot of grass outside and blue lockers. And the house we scouted [for the Carters] had orange and red curtains and those were filtering the sun so nicely by creating a really warm palette. [2018]
- [on visual references for Jojo Rabbit (2019)] We found and printed a lot of photos from World War II with children, and most of the great still photographers we all admire, like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau - all these guys who built the Magnum [Photos] agency - had amazing photos with kids during the war. What was really interesting about those is that they were still playing, and they were still doing normal kid stuff. It was just that the closer you look at the photo, and the longer you look, you realize something is wrong - like, "Oh, in this one, they are wearing gas masks," or "They are playing close to a pile of a bomb" - all these situations that we felt were very close to our story. [2019]
- [on finding the aesthetic rules for Jojo Rabbit (2019)] Our main rule was, 'Let's not go handheld at all.' We had a heavy camera on the dolly the whole time, and that kind of forces you into better choices, I think. (...) Then, we did intensive testing, just to be able to choose the right aspect ratio,... I think we did like five camera tests, without counting the hair and makeup tests, and that allowed us to play with all these formats. We really tried everything, from 1.33, 1.66, 1.85 and 2.40, and towards the end, we nailed down between 1.33 and 1.85. We felt that the widescreen might be too cinematic for our story. I think we were really attracted to 1.33, but we felt we might get a better chance of telling this story in 1.85, just because we had so many scenes with two people in small rooms. (...) One of the things we realized very early on is that both Taika and I are in love with symmetry and perfect horizons, and sometimes creating strange compositions, where we frame somebody all the way to the left or to the right of the shot. That was something we both enjoyed, and I remember after rehearsals, when we were trying to figure out how to shoot the scene, a lot of times, those were the elements we were looking for. [2019]
- [on the child-like perspective of Jojo Rabbit (2019)] We were deliberately placing the camera at Jojo's level, so we would see things from his perspective and feel what he was feeling. So you see his imaginary friend - Hitler [played by Taika Waititi] - in the way a child might see him: larger than life. And the color palette is part of that, too, because when you look back on childhood, you remember things a certain way. There's not this sense that everything has no color. For the battle and toward the end, it was our chance to have a different look, because we had so much color before. It was also a way to show the passage of time. [2019]
- [on A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014)] Our first idea was that even though it's the '90s, how do we try and make it look like a '70s movie and move the camera less, unless it's for a certain purpose ? And what type of lenses ? We ended up using Panavision anamorphic from the '60s. A huge advantage was a long prep and taking so many stills. It was a luxury. (...) It was interesting for us because we had so many night scenes and it was one of those things where we are in New York and you have to see outside the window. And I was working with David Brisbin, the production designer, trying to find locations with giant windows, where we can see outside them, even if it's the 13th floor and it's a drag. We found Matt's apartment and we fell in love with him seeing outside the window. But there were so many locations like that. We realized that now we have to shoot night for night because we want to see outside the window. It was hard for the actors but Liam [Liam Neeson] understood it. [2014]
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