The most important thing in imaging for me is the dynamic range. The dynamic range means the tones that you can capture from highlights to dark and the bits, the depth of color that you can capture.
Emmanuel Lubezki
The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.
I did sound for a number of years, so I know the pain of the sound mixer on a set where everybody was talking.
When you're shooting with long lenses, even if you're shooting a close-up, you feel the air, the distance between the camera and the subject.
I was able to shoot a movie like 'Tree of Life' because I had done 'Y Tu Mama Tambien.' The camera needed to capture that sense of freedom and joy and life you have when you're young.
The dynamic range of the digital camera is pretty crappy compared to film, but now film is not great because the labs have closed. It's going to hurt a lot of the movies that we did in this gap because I think they are going to look very old very soon.
I think the audience doesn't know a movie's lit, but they feel it. Because you've walked in a forest many times, or in a park, so you know how it looks. When you start lighting, subconsciously you know there is something that is absolutely wrong.
For each movie that I do, I like to find a specific language to tell the specific story.
A normal day of working in Burbank is 14 hours, sometimes more. On 'The Revenant' sometimes it was eight hours, but we were shooting only five. So they were short days, but they were very strenuous because of the weather. And it was very dark.
'Little Princess' was the first big movie that I did in America with big stages where we had kind of a different schedule to work. We had a great production designer, Bo Welch, and we had time to think about the movie in pre-production.
I have two daughters, and they grew up and wanted to get into Instagram, and I didn't know anything about social media. I started it to learn about what they were starting to do and how they communicate with their friends. I opened an account. Very fast, in a few hours, I realized that I actually liked it.
I have a very healthy dream life. I dream a lot many, many, many nights a week. When I'm shooting, it's even more - I don't know if it has to do with stress or with creation.
On 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' we started exploring shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors, and there are no cuts, and you feel like you're there.
I would love if film doesn't disappear, if we can have film forever so we would have all these brushes, all these possibilities available.
I'm very attracted to directors who want to experiment. The thing that attracts me the most are people who are trying find a language that is correct for their film, for that specific film.
The more tools we have directors and cinematographers will be able to express more and create different worlds and feelings. It's like having more instruments in an orchestra.
I can tell you that going to the Oscars is not as exciting as people think, at least for me.
I don't miss film projecting. I always hated it.
