Sam Raimi On Cinema

Time Out have published a nice interview with Sam Raimi that serves a nice refresher on how his filmmaking developed over the years, eventually reaching the incredibly high standards on display in the Spider-sequels.

Some excerpts:

I've always been interested in the camera and the effects of it – that's what drew me to film in the first place. My father would take home movies of the family and play them back and I was always amazed that you could capture reality and replay it. Backwards motion was incredibly cool. So the camera as a recording device was the thing that first thrilled me. Then I got interested in the moving camera. How does it affect an audience when a camera moves? What does the audience think when two shots are put together? And the pace of those shots, one after another, changing – how does that affect an audience? These are the questions I was interested in.

Then I realised I could still grow and learn new things if I began to focus on the actors in front of the camera – things that I had just moved around like pawns before because I was ignorant of the things they could bring to the picture. Now I became very interested in stories and emotion and actors and performance, to the point where, when I made A Simple Plan, I tried not to move the camera at all. I tried to allow the actors in the frame to tell the story, and I was very satisfied with that. That reinvigorated my appetite, and it still does to this day.

Now I'm reaching a point with the Spider-Man movies where I'm becoming re-interested in the camera again, especially with the possibilities of computer-generated imagery.