Visual Subtlety Quotes

I want the look of a movie to be secondary. I really want people to be engaged in the story and the characters and not think about a style or think about me or think about the director of photography and what a great job he's doing. I never feel like that should be there.

Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

The only consistency in the work I do is that I try to use cinematography to best tell the narrative and do justice to the character arcs, but not to do it in such an overt way that people are distracted by it.

The content of Saul Leiter's photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don't so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water.

I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.

I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

I usually try to make my images look like they just exist, like no effort was put into it.

Shadows which you see with difficulty, and whose boundaries you cannot define... these you should not represent as finished or sharply defined, for the result would be that your work would seem wooden.