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«There's nothing very mysterious about lighting. An old time Hollywood cameraman was asked how he lit the set and he said: 'You put a light up and turn it on. If you like it, you leave it. If you don't, you move it.' I like this approach because it undercuts a lot of rubbish that gets talked about lighting. [...] The only approach that makes sense to me is to become completely absorbed in the story in pre-production, talk to the director about films or paintings or novels or music or the script, talk to the production and costume designer, forget about any work you may have done in the past and then do what comes naturally. This is sometimes quite hard, because it’s easy to get an image on the screen, but much harder to make that image uniquely belong to the film you are shooting.
If it's a genre piece, i.e. a romantic comedy or horror, etc. then there is an expectation of what the film should look like based on the genre, and generally speaking it would be foolhardy to go against this. But it's possible to stay in the genre and still make the film your own.»

Oliver Stapleton B.S.C.