Creativity Quote by Conrad Hall

Hall’s line is a cinematographer’s magic trick told as physics: the sun looks “parallel” not because it’s special, but because distance turns chaos into order. On a set, that idea is a quiet manifesto. If you want clean, directional light - the kind that makes shadows behave, faces sculpt, horizons read - you don’t just chase brightness. You chase geometry. The sun’s authority comes from scale.

The intent is practical, almost deadpan: parallel rays are what give sunlight its crisp, legible shadows. But the subtext is about how images are engineered to feel natural. “So far away” is doing a lot of work here; it’s a reminder that what we accept as reality on screen is often a carefully faked approximation of the world’s most powerful fixture. Cinematographers recreate “sun” with big units pushed far back, or with optical tricks that mimic that distance, because closeness gives itself away. A nearby source spills, wraps, and reveals the artifice. Distance simplifies.

Context matters: Hall came up in an era when Hollywood was refining its relationship to naturalism, moving from studio gloss toward something moodier and more observational. His best work often feels inevitable, not lit. This quote explains that sensibility: the goal isn’t to make light dramatic, it’s to make it convincing. He’s pointing to a broader creative ethic, too: perspective changes everything. Step back far enough - literally with lights, metaphorically with decisions - and the messy beams of intention start to line up into something that reads as truth.