Jaume Collet-Serra Quotes

When you make a thriller/horror, darkness is [your] friend, because it lets the imagination go wild and what not. So you always end up going into darkness.

Obviously in the close-ups we bring extras around or we do it later, but them running in and the big shots, they don't know. They're just coming out.

Camera's are cheap. It's the lenses that are expensive.

For me, it was the challenge of doing a movie that is in one location. Usually, there are a few scripts obviously always going around with stories that happen in one location.

Producers and studios want to make movies that are more appealing internationally and I think that you have to use your different cultures as an advantage to be able to make those movies.

I wanted to move away from the disaster airplane movies that we have seen in the past and do something that was more mysterious, and delay until the end the resolution of the mystery, and then have to deal with the plane itself.

I think video is very useful, but it's very useful when you want a certain reality.

You have to think of each stage of the movie and how it progresses, get into the state of mind of the character, and then match the camera to that, and keep making it tighter and tighter and crazier and crazier so people don't get bored. You know you cannot do a similar shot that you did at the beginning of the movie at the end.

You know how hard it is to swim take after take and perform the next day swimming again? Me, I'm a terrible swimmer, but most actors with that tight schedule would be sick pretty quick.

If you do any thriller or horror movie a big part of the process is accounting for the cell phone.

Anamorphic doesn't really lend itself to the big shots.

I could only shoot when the subway was on the other platform. Little things like that, and the platform is very narrow. It's not like you can hide if a subway comes so a lot of things happened because of that. Or a thousand people just came and looked straight into the lens like they didn't expect a movie to be shooting.

Shooting digitally would not have been easier. Cameras are the same size. I always shoot on film unless I have a reason not to, which I haven't had yet.

The hard part on the subway is that you have, let's say, eight hours, but you have to hit these deadlines. From here to here, you can use this part. From this time to this time, you can use that part, and you have to hit them and it gets very stressful.

When you're a kid and you see gangsters living the life, you kind of want to be like that.

Now that everyone's shooting digital they want the anamorphic to soften the look. You know, to make it more filmic.

It's hard to do a camera inside of a car. Non-Stop would have been impossible. Usually modern lenses you can focus up to the lens pretty much, but anamorphic you can't. You need like three feet.

Anamorphic is very difficult because the distance from the lens to the person to focus is very long so you need a lot of distance from the camera to the person so that means that you need a lot of space.

I moved to Hollywood when I was 18. I never saw it as a disadvantage in any way. Quite the opposite.

I think that everything changes when it goes through the Mac; it's cheap. I think people then don't pay too much importance to the take, if you can do 40 takes.

I will shoot on film as long as they make it.

I think it's very interesting for a director that enjoys thrillers and mysteries like I do to have the challenge to do that.

These days in movies you can always come back to a location or do an insert or do something, so that's not even an issue any more. But coming back every day to the same plane, it messes with your head.

You have to offer sort of an evolution visually and do things like you've never seen before, like a fight between two men in a toilet on an airplane which was very exciting.