32 Quotes by John Dykstra

We still get to blow some stuff up. One of the most enjoyable things about doing special effects was going out and blowing up miniatures.

We stayed there 24 hours a day. We lived and ate and slept that movie. We were enthusiastic, not just because of the movie, but because we had such a great collaborative team. We had a really good time. It was very much a family.

Film, as far as I'm concerned, is my area of artistic endeavor, so I never think of a movie that gets released as being all done-it's just when they took it away from you.

It's funny because I've gone through a long career that started in '75. I've had the opportunity to direct a couple of movies, and I've directed lots of commercials. But I'd say since '85, directing a feature is something that I wanted to do; I just haven't understood the movies offered to me, or it was a case where the visual effects came before the story, which never interested me.

It's an embarrassment of riches because you have directors who don't better. You end up with so much stuff going on the screen that you don't know where to look, and that's what I consider self-indulgent.

The tsunami is a critical component in the telling of this story. It's a sensitive storytelling issue.

It's easy to create something that has a lot of luster, but it's very hard to make something that has a lot of depth.

If you understand how the real world feels and looks and sounds it is much easier to create a virtual version of the real world.

Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image.