Cheo Hodari Coker Quotes

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

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.

For 'City of Ghosts,' I really didn't speak any Arabic. It obviously made it more difficult, but I also found it to be an advantage while shooting. It allowed me to focus on the emotion of the scene as opposed to just chasing dialogue.

In the theatre, words are eighty to eighty-five percent of the importance of what is happening to you for your comprehension. In film, words are about twenty percent. It's a different figure, but it's almost an opposite ratio. For the words are only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework.

Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

I can remember the moment when I suddenly felt that the camera was a living partner. I suddenly felt this is art, and the camera is a co-operative living person. After that I was extremely happy to act in films.

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

When you see a silent movie, you understand everything that's going on from the images because the images are so strong.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

I understand why people went nuts for 'The Artist.' We use words so much, it's nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone - or something - is thinking or feeling.

It's kind of the filmmaker's job to use visual, cinematic language in a way possible to tell a story that reaches and touches as many people as possible.

Comics, in a sense, the style, the images - it's almost like music. They say music is a universal language, but when the eyes behold something, a figure, somebody moving; it's real, and it cannot be denied.

There are things I want to say: They are very important to me, and, not being a writer, I do it through movies.

I try and let the film do the talking.

The silent movie is an emotional cinema: it's sensory; the fact that you don't go through a text brings you back to a basic way of telling a story predicated on the feelings you have created.

With silent films, you're better off avoiding irony, because the spectator is your accomplice. It's this pact that leads to emotion being created.

I definitely have moments in my life where I discovered a film, and the language of the film itself spoke to me in a way, as if someone came up to you and started speaking a language you'd never heard but understood and was able to express things the language you knew could not.

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.

I believe the most interesting thing to look at in the world is the human face, so that is why I tend to be a little closer to human faces than maybe other directors will be.

Cinema is a visual medium one has to communicate through visuals, and therefore, dialogues should be less.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.