56 Quotes by John Knoll

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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