Silent Storytelling Quotes

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

You can tell how good a filmmaker is if you can turn the sound down but you can still feel the story.

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.

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

They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do.

I don't need dialogue to convey emotion or thoughts to my audience.

A writer can be identified just through his sigh, as a mouthful of words are flooded out in his single sigh.

PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

I think, even a lot of people that make movies forget is that, in my mind, a movie should work with the sound off. You should be able to watch a movie without the sound and understand what's going on. That's your job, to build a series of chronological images that tell the story.

BoJack especially is a very dialogue based show. A lot of the comedy comes from conversations, and a lot of story comes from misunderstandings and people trying to connect with each other, and there was a really interesting challenge trying to write a script with no dialogue.

I let the music do the talking, and people are still getting feelings from my songs.

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.

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.

One's ability to communicate a story visually, honestly, is a bridge of communication that transcends language because the true mark of a good film is that you can turn the sound off and watch it and have some understanding of what you're seeing.

When you are doing pantomime, you're not immersing yourself in anything terribly deep.