Stephen Sondheim Quotes

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

I think there's a connection with 'Nightcrawler' and 'Blowup' and other films where visual imagery is integral to the story. It allows you to play with images.

I made several short films with very little dialogue. I'm still not a fan of talking heads. My stories are told with images as much as possible.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

We do not need a text-based cinema... we need an image-based cinema.

I didn't quite realise until we started to put together our first cut of 'Wonderstruck' how much time is spent with no words spoken whatsoever.

For me, I'm not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it's easier and better to express a story through visuals.

We're really interested in more visual storytelling, figuring out a way to blend our level of observation with a bigger visual scope.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

I discovered that silent film is almost an advantage. You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines pollute it. It doesn't take much - a gaze, an eyelash flutter - for the emotion to be vivid.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

Well, visual language is another boring discussion about the nature of film.

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.

I've never made a film using dialogue or speech.

One picture is worth a thousand words.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.

Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.

Writers would hate me saying this, and I love words, but I have to say that cinema exists, on one level, for the power of the big image and what that image does.

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

Image is an international language.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.