Dramatic Effect Quotes

I always had a feeling, for example, that there should be something from Verdi's "Requiem" in the film. You hear it when you see the lava flow in Iceland. That turned out to be a very easy choice.

My favorite music is when the sound is supplementing the message. I don't think it's dramatic; it's cinematic.

Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.

'Miracle at St. Anna.' I was challenged by Spike Lee. When he offered me the film, he looked me square in the eye and said, 'You start this film off and you end this film. I don't want a dry eye in the theatre. Can you pull that off?' He was dead serious.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

I have a bad habit, in the shows that I run, of killing off the people that I love.

I try to play serious scenes a little funny and the comedy a little serious.

Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.

It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

I've done about four deaths in films now, and I think it's quite good because then it's sort of a memorable moment in the film.

Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety.

Whether it's Shakespeare or Moliere, irony is a key component in the construction of theatre. A script would be pretty bad if it was devoid of irony.

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.

In pro wrestling, if somebody throws a move, it's my job not to get hurt but also to sell the move and make it look like I'm dying.

You had to make everything much more truthful for the camera. With the stage it's a given that it's going to be theatrical.

It must have been so impossible to think about it and dare to do that, so they feel compassionate for her. I don't think the movie would work otherwise.

The subject of a good tragedy must not be realistic.

Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close

It's very hard to dramatise something factual and not make it look overdone, but also not to make it look so under-dramatised that it's dull.

I love drama. Drama is, like, my thing. I want a movie that will move something inside me, that's going to shift something and keep me thinking.

I don't steer towards anything. I steer towards character and truth. If it's funny then so be it. If it's dramatic, so be it. I just steer towards characters.

I think lighting is a reflection of what is at stake emotionally in a movie.

One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.