John Knoll Quotes

John Knoll

Profession : Artist

Birth : October 6, 1962

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

John Knoll

I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures.

John Knoll

'Pacific Rim,' for me, was a chance to touch on those old Toho monster movies. 'Godzilla' and 'Rodan'... and then 'Ultraman' and 'Robotech' and all those kinds of things.

John Knoll

Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.

John Knoll

I've been lucky enough in my career to have opportunities to revisit things that meant a lot to me in childhood.

John Knoll

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

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

John Knoll

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

You can hardly turn around and not see something that was done in Photoshop.

John Knoll

It's harder to get your second picture than it is to get your first one.

John Knoll

Reacting is so important to the craft of acting.

John Knoll

Eighty percent of my job is to ask the question, 'If this were real, what would it look like?'

John Knoll

When I was a kid, I built miniatures, and that was actually the first thing I did professionally in the film industry. It was a demonstrable skill that I had, so I worked as a model maker.

John Knoll

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

ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.

John Knoll

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

John Knoll

Life's too short to be spending all your waking hours doing something you're not excited about. And when people are that excited, you can see it in the work.

John Knoll

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

John Knoll

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

When you are shooting traditional motion capture, it's a big footprint on set. There are, like, 16 cameras that are needed and constraints over the lighting.

John Knoll