Haskell Wexler famous quotes

We, as film-makers, are privileged. We can make people cry or laugh. We can make them think and feel. It is a great privilege and a great responsibility.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Responsibility #Thinking #People

I'd say to anyone trying to break into the business: Don't just be interested in movies. Be interested in life. Be a person. Be in touch.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Trying #Life Is #Break

There is a very particular feeling I get when I have the camera in my hand, looking at an actor talk, knowing that what I’m shooting will end up on the screen.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Knowing #Hands #Feelings

Lighting was very primitive. And still it was really the way to learn because sometimes some of the modern technology is so extreme and so compartmentalized that we lose sight of exactly what we're doing.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Technology #Sight #Way

I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue. And it was an important issue to me, personally. And the whole question of when - when do you put the camera down or when do you keep shooting to get the shot. And a number of times in my life I've had that question hit me very hard.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Attitude #Thinking #Numbers

I am part of a system which encourages people to buy things and do things which are not to their best interest.
-- Haskell Wexler

#People #Interest

I've been in wars and in riots and hung out of many helicopters in the early days. And there's a detachment that happens when you look through the camera. You're looking for the shot.
-- Haskell Wexler

#War #Cameras #Looks

Well, there is a contradiction in a sense. If you're making commercials which sell products which are unhealthy or which are unnecessary, I think that you are part of a system - I am part of a system which encourages people to buy things and do things which are not to their best interest. And to that extent you could say it was contradictory.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Thinking #People #Unnecessary

There was no actually stock footage in "Medium Cool." I wrote the script. I wrote the riots. And I integrated the actors in the film in the park during the demonstrations. But nowhere was it like we had stock footage and then later, in editing, integrated it into the film. It was all done at the time.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Editing #Actors #Done

When people have problems with their mortgages and jobs many feel they're a failure, they didn't work hard enough or speak well enough: It's their fault things are going so bad. When they see their bodies right there [at occupations], we have something profoundly in common.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Jobs #Hard Work #People

I was shooting all this time. And there was only one guy who helped to pull him. And I had to think whether I was going to keep shooting or help the guy. And so I kept shooting and then they put him in this little clinic, and I photographed through the window while they had to amputate his leg. And I felt very strange because I didn't - I felt I could have helped, but I didn't help. But then I also felt elated that I was getting a shot that would be important to the film.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Thinking #Guy #Important

I rationalize out, well, how much help could you really be, you know? And maybe if people saw this, they'd realize the brutality of war and figure out there's got to be some better way than killing human beings who are just trying to farm a field.
-- Haskell Wexler

#War #People #Trying

Well, of course the general idea was dreamed up by the advertising agency and so my job was to realize that. And we down to Lubbock, Texas, usually and onto a ranch and we would pick cowboys who looked the part and photograph them under dramatic situations - rounding up wild horses or running through streams and then reaching in and taking a drag on a cigarette.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Running #Horse #Jobs

Now, I have to - in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who - many of whom who've died of emphysema since we were shooting.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Cowboy #Mind #Defense

I think that it gave me a really strong feeling of my life force and a confidence in myself. I felt like I was a man. Before that point for some reason, I always felt I was a boy (laughter). In fact, they called me the baby on the ship 'cause I was the youngest guy on the ship. But I always felt that way.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Baby #Strong #Laughter

When you hear the word tear gas you think, well, your eyes will burn and that's it. But that whole feeling of your whole skin burning, that you can't breathe, you can't inhale, you feel suffocated - it's a very, very terrifying experience.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Eye #Thinking #Feelings

I don't know where you're reading all this stuff, but it's pretty accurate, yes. It was in 1942. I was on a ship called the Accelo(ph) coming back from the Red Sea and we were sunk off the coast of Africa by a German submarine. And I was in a lifeboat for 14 days and landed and lived with the Pondos in South Africa while - who took care of us and took care of me. I had some wound in my left leg.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Reading #Sea #Submarines

The idea of accountability in Vietnam, Nicaragua and now Iraq - the media never has that in its quiver. When you see time after time there is no possibility of Nuremberg [war crime trials], we're doomed to have it repeated.
-- Haskell Wexler

#War #Media #Ideas

When I started, we had just the camera and the person, mostly. And if you wanted to do a dolly shot, particularly working in Chicago where I began, you'd get in the back trunk of a car, and you'd have a friend drive the car, or you'd get in some kid's little wagon that he plays with and have someone pull that for dolly shots.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Kids #Play #Car

Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Believe #People #Profound

I had a rope around my waist, and the rope was attached into the helicopter in case I fell off. And the shot was a shot that began with Kim Novak going out of a house and getting into a bus. Then it was supposed to go over the countryside and find a freight train on which Bill Holden was standing. And then after seeing a good look at the freight train, the camera was supposed to move up into the sky for the end credits.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Moving #Sky #House

The helicopter was a U.S. Navy helicopter. There were no civilian helicopters available to film companies, so they just made some stuff out of two-by-four wood. And I would straddle a two-by-four out from the helicopter with a camera and what we call a high hat, which is a low metal stand.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Two #Navy #Cameras

I used it in a shot where Richard Burton goes down the hall to get a gun in a closet. And I wanted to get some excitement, and the hallway was too narrow for the dollies that they had at that time. So it was quite useful.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Gun #Excitement #Used

When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, I was shooting a farmer in a field - just a pastoral scene. And while I was shooting him, an explosion occurred right - he blew up right in my lens, so to speak. And he had stepped on a landmine.
-- Haskell Wexler

#Lenses #Vietnam #Shooting