Visual Direction Quotes

I design my shots. I walk the rehearsal as the camera and say 'this is where I want to be... I want this look.

As a director, I start with the visual.

Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

For me, when I started writing, it was mostly poetry. And poetry is very visual. I feel the same way about the way that I approach direction. There might be a theme within the visuals that you're choosing that people don't consciously pick up on, but that they feel.

Very quickly I realized that directing is a combination of things: It's visual, it's directing the actors, it's telling a story. And people don't always mention this part of directing, but it's also knowing how to really edit something into something that makes sense.

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise, etc. Even if you do, sometimes there's a side of things that don't necessarily gel the way people intend. So there a bit of a mystical entity, film.

A lot of shows are more script-driven, like a prose script. As an actor, you never see a storyboard.

When I was thinking of video ideas for this song, I wanted it to reflect the energy of the music and express the big eye roll that 'Sit Here and Cry' is. I had a very specific visual vision for it, and when I saw Sam Siske's reel, I knew he was going to get it.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

I'm really a nightmare for the fashion designer because I take away all of his authority, and I become the authority, and I turn him into my assistant. You could say I intervene, and I intervene in a very determining way in all the aspects that have to do with the visual construction of the film.

If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.

You're in a movie, so you have to think about how something plays. It's not like you're thinking about how an audience is going to react. You're trying to present the story. You're trying to illuminate the lives of these people in the story. So I'm thinking about how my behavior as this character best illuminates what's going on with them in this moment in time. I always say it's sort of the director's job. People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

On 'Sicario,' we storyboarded key sequences but not everything.

Knowing who the actors were as you were designing them helped, with Catherine's beauty and Renee's frailty, they directed me visually just by who they were.

Concentrate on a single feature - as, build all toward one eye - make all lines lead toward that eye.