Marshall Brickman Quotes

In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.

Whereas with Sirk, everything is always filmed. No matter what the script, he's always a real director.

I'm a visual filmmaker so the camera is a big part of my storytelling tool and it's something that I really rely on to tell a scene or create the suspense that I need and create the emotion of a scene or a sequence.

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

A close-up on screen can say all a song can.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.

I love scenes with minimal dialogue.

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

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

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.

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.

Language, I think, has nothing to do with film-making. It is how you make your point and whether you exploit the visual medium maintaining a certain standard that does the trick.

As a cinematographer, I was always attracted to stories that have the potential to be told with as few words as possible.

Professional cinema image-taking should integrate, serve, interest, and enhance the story. I judge cinematography not just for a story well told but for what the story is.

The films I love are very precise, and every shot means something; every shot should convey something new.

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.

The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.

The great thing about having spent all this time on film sets is that I've been able to watch directors and how they work. I now know that this is what I want to do as well: to tell stories visually. But it's definitely my vision that I want to put across, nobody else's.

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.

The less lines, the better. I am the silent film actor, but not in a slapstick sort of way. Film is an image-based medium, so whatever you can say without the words is far more provocative and punctuating. If the lines are not funny or if they don't advance the story, sometimes it's hard. I hate talk in movies.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

Actually, I met a lot of directors and most of them have that fantasy to make a silent movie because for directors it's the purest way to tell a story. It's about creating images that tell a story and you don't need dialogue for that.

We had a script that was really solid and we knew how we were going to shoot and how the energy of it was going to go. So it gave us a lot of freedom to use the camera as a character.

I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.