John Knoll Quotes

In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later.

John Knoll

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• Any tool can be used for good or bad. It's really the ethics of the artist using it.

  

  John Knoll
  • Good
  • Bad
  • Ethics

• I don't have any particular loyalties to one technique or another. I'm just trying to use the best for the job.

  

  John Knoll
  • Trying
  • Job

• Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever.

  

  John Knoll
  • Picture

• I just have this very simple idea about the rebel spies in the opening crawl of A 'New Hope' who steal the plans for the Death Star.

  

  John Knoll
  • Hope
  • Death
  • Simple

• When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker.

  

  John Knoll
  • Model

• Reacting is so important to the craft of acting.

  

  John Knoll
  • Important

• 'Baby's Day Out' is maybe not a great movie, but... No, I've enjoyed and learned things from every project I've worked on. That was an important step in my career at ILM.

  

  John Knoll
  • Great
  • Important
  • Movie

• Ideally, you will never know that you're seeing a computer-generated car.

  

  John Knoll
  • Car

• I have three daughters who grew up while I was working on the special editions and the prequels. They got to be big 'Star Wars' fans. And, you know, I would see them identifying with a lot of the male characters, and I just thought, 'Star Wars' could use more good strong female leads.'

  

  John Knoll
  • Up
  • Good
  • Strong

• The way that Lucasfilm used ILM was George never restricted his thinking to things that he knew could be executed with the tools at the time. He would write what he thought would be cool and what he wanted from a storytelling standpoint with the assumption that, 'Well, they'll figure it out!'

  

  John Knoll
  • Time
  • Thinking
  • Cool

• Having been a cameraman, I think about, 'Well, if this was real, how would this be shot?' I try to inject as much realism as much as possible.

  

  John Knoll
  • Real

• When I first started in the industry, there were - this is prior to the era of computer graphics and all these digital tools - there were some pretty rigid, technologically imposed limitations about how you shoot things, because if you didn't shoot 'em the right way, you couldn't make the shot work.

  

  John Knoll
  • Work
  • Pretty

• It's definitely an issue if the actor has passed away without stating any intention or desire about how his or her likeness should be dealt with. Then it falls to their estate. That's a problem that will start solving itself. Now the technology exists, and actors are aware of this and can make their wishes known.

  

  John Knoll
  • Desire
  • Technology
  • Wishes

• I've always lived by the principle of find what you really enjoy doing and make it your career.

  

  John Knoll
  • Career

• You have to do what the story demands, but inside of those constraints, I try to inject as much realistic physics as I'm allowed to.

  

  John Knoll

• 'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.

  

  John Knoll
  • Work
  • Done
  • Scary

• I read a magazine called 'Cinefantastique' that had just come out with a making of 'Star Wars' issue. They had some very long and detailed interviews with a whole bunch of people at ILM. I think I memorized that whole magazine.

  

  John Knoll
  • People
  • Long
  • Star

• If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.

  

  John Knoll
  • Real
  • Movie
  • Army

• I've gone through a whole series of careers where something started as a hobby of some kind. Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.

  

  John Knoll

• Imagine a 'Mission: Impossible'-style spy or infiltration mission into the core, the very heart of the Empire's military-industrial complex, the most secure facility in the Empire. You have a small band of experts with complementary skills who, together, are able to do these amazing things.

  

  John Knoll
  • Heart
  • Together
  • Small

• In high school and college, I'd set a bunch of goals for myself. I wanted to be the lead effects supervisor on one of these really big, innovative visual effects productions, something on the scale of a 'Star Wars' movie. And I wanted to work on a project that wins the Academy Award for best visual effects.

  

  John Knoll
  • Work
  • School
  • Movie

• There's no reason to think Disney is going to stop wanting to make 'Star Wars' movies if there's quality and there's interest. It has unlimited potential. It has a huge number of characters, worlds... It's a massive playground.

  

  John Knoll
  • Stop
  • Quality
  • Star

• A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

  

  John Knoll
  • Work
  • Done
  • Game

• If you were a new guy at ILM, they put you on the night crew - my shift was from 7 P.M. to about 5 A.M. In my free time, I was working on an idea with my older brother, a software engineer getting his doctorate at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, it developed into Photoshop.

  

  John Knoll
  • Time
  • Guy
  • Night