James Gray Quotes

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

People use location as a language in films, and Quentin uses action as a language in his films. There's really not a lot of violence. It's more of an emotional beat than it is a physical beat.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

I try not to look for messages in films.

I love films like 'Deliverance' where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.

Dialogues and emotion based movies don't always work.

It's great when somebody is able to communicate an actual shot sequence to you and you know the world you're inhabiting with that. It's literally a haunting tune.

I always feel in movies, I don't know if it's because I'm jaded, but I always feel like we don't go far enough.

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.

Movies aren't machines. They interact with our brains.

Film as a medium, like a novel as a medium, possesses a unique ability to communicate. Film is capable of communicating in a way that no other medium can, and I would say the same for the novel.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

'Piku' was driven by subtleties. Most films come with the padding of the sound, the visual, the drama.

Look at 'Marienbad' honestly. What is it? It is just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

I gravitate much more toward realism, realism in the work that I do, but magical realism got me hooked on film. I think it was my first time realizing that there was something besides popcorn movies.

In the past, a lot of films based on video games think that the audience wants to experience what it's like to play the game, and that's absolutely not the case.