"A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist, moving an audience... making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark."
"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."
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Source: Remembering Gordon Willis, ASC by Jon Fauer, www.fdtimes.com. May 20, 2014.
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More quotes by Gordon Willis
"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."
"Complexity is not good. People don't understand the elegance of simplicity."
"Don't get simple mixed up with simplistic."
"I'm a minimalist. I see things in simple ways...It's human nature to define complexity as better. Well, it's not."
"I wasn't trying to be different; I just did what I liked. Don't misunderstand when I say I really had no particular DP I was aspiring to be. I really fell in love with the movies as I was growing up, and I must say, I was emulating things that I saw others doing, that’s how you learn, but you soon have to push past that, and do things that you feel are right… or better."