"A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist, moving an audience... making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark."
"The thing about film is that your eye is selective. Film isn't. You have to make film do what you want. Simply photographing something doesn't do it. You have to know how to apply light and know what it does on film."
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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."
"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."
"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."