40 Quotes by Haskell Wexler

When you hear the word tear gas you think, well, your eyes will burn and that’s it. But that whole feeling of your whole skin burning, that you can’t breathe, you can’t inhale, you feel suffocated – it’s a very, very terrifying experience.

I am part of a system which encourages people to buy things and do things which are not to their best interest.

We, as film-makers, are privileged. We can make people cry or laugh. We can make them think and feel. It is a great privilege and a great responsibility.

Lighting was very primitive. And still it was really the way to learn because sometimes some of the modern technology is so extreme and so compartmentalized that we lose sight of exactly what we’re doing.

I’ve been in wars and in riots and hung out of many helicopters in the early days. And there’s a detachment that happens when you look through the camera. You’re looking for the shot.

When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, I was shooting a farmer in a field – just a pastoral scene. And while I was shooting him, an explosion occurred right – he blew up right in my lens, so to speak. And he had stepped on a landmine.

My mother let me know that we’re all connected. If some of us become more affluent it’s not because we’re better or even smarter people – we have a responsibility to ourselves to be a good boy.

In “Virginia Woolf” I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera.

I’d say to anyone trying to break into the business: Don’t just be interested in movies. Be interested in life. Be a person. Be in touch.