Top 50 Vilmos Zsigmond Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t just stick with what you know, you have to evolve.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

2. “Mexican cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio Fernandez were students of both Sergei Eisenstein and Toland. Their exteriors and lighting were gorgeous. And the films Ingmar Bergman did with Sven Nykvist were exceptional.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

3. “As the cinematographer is usually more visual than the director is and full cooperation is really the answer and to make a great film, you need a good director and you need a good cinematographer.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

4. “In Slumdog Millionaire when you are immersed in the point of view of children in the slum and the bustle of the city, the handheld camerawork is amazing. A handheld camera is perfect for establishing point-of-view and for instilling the feeling that you are there.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

5. “Technology has a great deal to do with it. The Panaflex camera was a big breakthrough when it came along; it changed everything, because now you could shoot from the perspective of a person riding in the backseat of a car.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

6. “I’m always looking in the lighting to tell the story in a different way than it actually looks in real life because it’s, for me, more contrast sometimes has to mean it’s softer than normal.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

7. “I love the Dutch impressionists – Vermeer, Rembrandt. What they were able to do with light was astonishing. As for photographers, I think mostly of the Hungarians: Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jozsef Pesci. In fact, I have one of his photographs hanging in my house.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

8. “I like the film camera better because the film is still one hundred times better than any digital image at the moment. So, there are certain movies that you can’t really do digitally.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

9. “When I do a still picture, I’m doing it all by myself with no help. I’m designing everything. I am my own art director. I’m doing everything. I’m directing, editing, whatever.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

10. “There is something more to “reality” than just the tangible. There is also mood, and you cannot skip that.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

11. “I shot a lot of commercials and sometimes I enjoy the commercial shooting and sometimes I really hate it, but in thirty seconds or one minute, you can make some remarkable work shooting in one or two or three days.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

12. “There is something missing in a lot of digital filmmaking, something I call “poetic reality.” That’s something you see played out in film noir, where the technique establishes the mood.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

13. “I don’t like to be in front of the camera – my place is behind the camera.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

14. “Spielberg was very young and starting up when we did Sugarland Express and I loved that, but the main thing was that I really loved his talent.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

15. “For me, movies should be visual. If you want dialogue, you should read a book.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

16. “I look at a picture like Scarecrow and think, ‘Jesus, how could they have let us make that?’ I mean, if you used technology that old nowadays, it would look like old Hollywood.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

17. “I love Woody Allen. He’s very clever, always thinking, and he’s great with actors. He lets actors do what they want to do and occasionally he’ll give them a specific kind of direction.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

18. “The best way to know when there’s good lighting is when you don’t notice it.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

19. “I like to say that lighting is about taking the light away. I often like to use the shadows more than the light.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

20. “Telling the story with only a few shots, I love that style. It makes you feel like you’re part of the action, part of the story. It reminds me of the theater, where one act is basically like one long shot. It almost makes you forget that you’re seeing a movie.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

21. “I think that film is still an artform and it doesn’t really matter if you’re using a digital camera or a film camera.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

22. “You always like to be the collaborator. I don’t want to take over the movie, because if I want to do that, I should really become a director because then you have the control of everything, basically. I’m very happy to just be the visual part of it, doing the visual part of the movie.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

23. “You make a film for a million dollars and then it costs $10 million to sell it. That’s the problem at the moment with independent filmmaking: You can make it cheap and then there’s no money to market it.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

24. “I don’t think there is any advantage to digital unless it’s in a case like Slumdog Millionaire, where you have to get a shot and a big bulky film camera is out of the question.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

25. “If you use hand-held techniques just to make the film stylish I think it’s wrong.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

26. “When we came to America, the movies here needed a “new wave.” European films looked totally different than American movies, which were these lush, glossy pictures with this elaborate production design.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

27. “There are many, many different kinds of movies and directors and styles. I don’t mind that a movie looks like a movie.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

28. “When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

29. “Each story has a different approach for me and I try to work with lighting that will tell you visually the story better than if it was shot in available light.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

30. “I really like to work with people who know a lot, but they also give me space so I can add something to the movie.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

31. “I am actually retired – yes, I am retired. But I like to work. So I’m retired until someone calls me up to work.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

32. “Even in manipulating the images, I would like to do my dailies in a digital way because you can do so many things in that stage that I cannot do in real photography.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

33. “I’m not really satisfied with the technology today. Using film was so much easier than the digital technology of today. But digital is still at the beginning of what it can be and they’ll be fixing all those problems.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

34. “I hope that film is going to stay as an artform and that people won’t forget that there are good movies also to be made.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

35. “Some movies are what I would call murky. Just because it’s murky doesn’t make it artistic. It makes it hard to see.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

36. “These days that wouldn’t happen – waiting for the light to be exactly right. Because it takes time and time is money. And with these big productions with expensive actors, you just don’t have the time to get every shot exactly right.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

37. “I like to work with talented people, I must say that. That’s my weakness. I really like to work with good directors. That doesn’t mean I don’t like to work with starting up young directors, that’s fun also.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

38. “What I would suggest to the young people is to not forget this and don’t try to get assimilated into today’s Hollywood style of movies because I don’t think it’s going to last long.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

39. “I think that the audience should not be able to tell if it is real or not real – it should be an enhanced version of reality, or an artistic view of reality, that captures not only what is physically there, but what is not visible – the mood.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

40. “When I was in Hungary in December I was looking at student films and I could not tell which ones were shot on film and which ones were shot digitally. I think that is because the filmmakers in Europe go to four years of film school and learn the techniques.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

41. “I love to make movies about young people – young scientists that are inventing things and all the writing they did was very funny and very true.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

42. “I don’t know the American photographers as well, but I admit I love Ansel Adams. His landscapes are so crisp.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

43. “There are a lot of directors out there that don’t like to deal with actors, I think. Many of them have said something like, in the future they will actually manipulate the actors on their computers. But don’t believe all this.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

44. “I am not against digital at all.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

45. “I think too many film students in America are losing the artistry and not learning lighting the right way.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

46. “I had never met Woody Allen before Melinda and Melinda. My agent knew the producer of the movie and he suggested that we would work well together and then we did. We had a great time on that film.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

47. “When you are shooting a movie, you have to collaborate with many, many, many people. First of all, the director with all his own ideas and I can only just help him with that. I cannot change his idea.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

48. “I’m always looking for directors who are very strong, they have great ideas, but on the other hand, that need help. It means they rely mostly on my eyes.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

49. “I should mention Vittorio Storaro, who was Bernardo Bertolucci’s cinematographer. You watch those films and they are exceptional.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond

50. “I think film is about images. Cinema needs good images. I think that if you don’t have good images, it’s not going to be a good film. I think all films should be really visual.”

— Vilmos Zsigmond