Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.

I don't really believe in the mystery of cinematography - what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense.

If I am creating the shots from scratch I may have to spend more time holding the directors hand and therefore have less time to finesse the shot or the lighting etc. but it really all depends on the project. Some films benefit from their spontaneity.

You can’t learn your craft by copying me or anyone else. I hope what I do can do is in some way inspire others but I would be appalled if I thought my work was being studied as ‘the right way to do the job’. My way is just one of an infinite number of ways to do the job.

All I’ve ever wanted to do is take stills of people, or take documentaries about people, and try to express to an audience how somebody lives next door. You know what I mean? Just how similar we all are as individuals.

I think of filmmaking as a form of communication. Maybe it's also an art, but that's for somebody else to decide.

Your whole life informs your eye.

When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.

Am I nostalgic for film? … I mean, it’s had a good run, hasn’t it? You know, I’m not nostalgic for a technology. I’m nostalgic for the kind of films that used to be made that aren’t being made now.

Partly why I love to operate is that I love to watch an actor within a shot. When you watch a shot, and you know that everything's come together, I feel I'm the first person watching it. I always get pleasure out of that.

When you move the camera, or you do a shot like the crane down (in Shawshank) with them standing on the edge of the roof, then it's got to mean something. You've got to know why you're doing it it's got to be for a reason within the story, and to further the story.

Every shot I have ever made has been a compromise in some way. No image has ever been as good as the one I envisioned in my mind's eye.

Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.

I never really considered film as a career, but I knew I didn't want to be a builder. So I went to art college, and it just gradually happened.