Bruce Beresford Quotes on Movies (8 Quotes)

In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.

I said we should really use an unknown in King David because any actor that you use for such a famous figure, you're going to get a laugh.

Film is shot in fragments, and the same moments can be shot again and again until the director is satisfied.

We had a lot of trouble with that third role because I said to the studio that it was important to get someone who was, on the one hand, a wonderful actor, and, on the other hand was not well known, because if you had simply hired an actor like one of the Baldwin brothers or someone like that the audience would have known that they were too big a star to be killed off and not come back.

Well, I storyboard the films from every shot and from every angle. I specify to the cameraman where the camera should be and what lens he should use and then I work out all the moves for the actors. Of course this can change, but I would have to say that 95 of the time the film is done exactly the way I have storyboarded it.

Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life.