Saul Bass Quotes

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

I don't really see the point in making a film unless you can think of a good reason to do it.

Flashback in film rarely works.

Whereas 'Avatar' and other movies get shocks out of their three-dimensionality, 'Gatsby' is going to be about inviting the audience into this larger-than-life drama, letting them almost be inside the room rather than looking at it through the window. I think it will really work.

The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.

I don't think there's a subject matter that can't absorb 3-D; that can't tolerate the addition of depth as a storytelling technique.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

When the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by looking at the camera in a movie, it's generally been used for comedic purposes, rather than feeling like they're looking into your soul.

You do understand that you can't force the situation, but in terms of how you edit, you can define that to take the audience along, whether it be a storyline or a character moment that we can play out. The more experience you've had, the more beneficial it is, period.

For me, it is important to not just tell the audience how the story ended today, but to give a glimpse into how other people's stories might go on, in the future.

I had a rope around my waist, and the rope was attached into the helicopter in case I fell off. And the shot was a shot that began with Kim Novak going out of a house and getting into a bus. Then it was supposed to go over the countryside and find a freight train on which Bill Holden was standing. And then after seeing a good look at the freight train, the camera was supposed to move up into the sky for the end credits.

No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

It should be interesting to see two entirely different ways to treat a story, geared for two entirely different kinds of audience.

It's good filmmaking when you don't have to say anything and you can still tell the story.

The ability to get inside your character's head in a graphic novel is really fun and useful because one, you can really define the character's voice and two, it's a way easier way to convey what the character's thinking by actually laying out what he's thinking.

I like telling the story in a visual way. I don't like explaining a lot in dialogue.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

I think the voice over actually enhances the various moments instead of compensating for something that's lacking. Voice over can be tricky. It can be dangerous because its over used or inappropriately used. I think in this case it informs the story.

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.

If the question was did we want to delay the revelation?... Yeah, you want to delay it as long as possible because the audience knows that that moment is coming and you want to make them wait for it. They have to suffer a bit.

No matter how tight the shot is, if I'm narrating it too much, there's a barrier between you and the experience, because the process of reading a book, or watching a movie, or watching a play is that you're watching a dream.

We had forgotten the art of using silence to convey emotions in our films and that's what you seem to have mastered. You've used silence to great advantage in the film. It's brilliant.

It is the objective of the protagonist that keeps us in our seats.

More often than not, I'm worried about, where shouldn't we have music? Because the tendency is just to put everything everywhere all the time in a lot of movies. You end up just numbing the audience when you do that and it's not the best way to tell a story.

One of the great things about film is that, typically anything that's introduced in the first five minutes, the audiences will by into.