focus puller

So it’s not just about the actors, it’s about the dolly grip, the focus puller, and you’ve got choreography going on.

“There are times you put Stanley first and you’re second,” says focus puller Douglas Milsome, whose hand once froze to the camera lens during filming.

“You have a focus puller if you bumped into him on the street, you wouldn’t recognize him, even though this is someone you’ve been working with every day,” she said.

More respectably, he works as a focus puller at a film studio, where, amusingly, a director is having trouble getting an actress to faint, despite having a covert master of shock on his crew.

Cinematographers were also widely expected to compose each shot, and the growing use of camera movement gave them more seniority: they would need to employ a camera operator and focus puller, too.