The experience of using a Rolleiflex camera is very different than using a SLR.
Matthew Modine
They don't have the news media set up in Africa that we do in the United States, where televisions are so accessible and newspapers and magazines are able to educate people.
I bought all the stuff, but nothing was as satisfying to me as using the Rolleiflex because it was one shot.
For example, Michael Mann's film Collateral - there is certain kinds of stories that lend themselves to digital photography. Some things are very raw stories that digital photography kind of lends itself to.
Photography is about light and what it does and how it is captured on a piece of negative.
My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.
If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.
Everything is so convenient in New York.
I always thought that it was kind of silly that a baseball card could be worth so much money.
I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is.
I never set out to be rich and famous. I wanted to follow my own path.
I've worked with Robert Altman a couple of times too.
It was the baseball fantasy of a lifetime - to be able to sit on the bench with all those professional athletes. I got to take my son along because I wasn't sure I would be able to play with them.
So the thing that's beautiful about the Rolleiflex is that I open the camera up from the top and put my face in and that the camera's all about composition and all about light.
Stanley didn't shy away from true humanity or from the ugliness that all people are capable of.
There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.
Think of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. They used the same actors over and over again.
We should all aspire in life to do a multitude of things well - to be a great father, to be a good husband, to be a good lover, you know, to try to do things the best you can is very important to me.
You hope and pray that you'll get involved with a director that you understand and who has the same sensibility as you do and knows how to push you and bring out the best in you.
