Robert Eggers Quotes

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

The less lines, the better. I am the silent film actor, but not in a slapstick sort of way. Film is an image-based medium, so whatever you can say without the words is far more provocative and punctuating. If the lines are not funny or if they don't advance the story, sometimes it's hard. I hate talk in movies.

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.

What's genius about 'Gravity' is that you are close upon the actors, but 3D works best when you have foreground, middle ground and background.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

I shot 'Fruitvale Station' on super-16, and then I shot a movie called 'The Harvest' on 35mm, and then I shot 'Little Accidents' on 2-perf 35.

It's one of my obsessions to come up with ways to reimagine establishing shots in new, non-boring ways. Shots that have energy and excitement.

My goal from the very beginning was to make very visually lush, juicy films that you can really sink your teeth into. That's always been part of my modus operandi.

The films I love are very precise, and every shot means something; every shot should convey something new.

Partly why I love to operate is that I love to watch an actor within a shot. When you watch a shot, and you know that everything's come together, I feel I'm the first person watching it. I always get pleasure out of that.

If you take something like the slave-auction sketch, the warmth of the light gives it a crisp 12 Years a Slave look. And your eye tells your brain, "I should be taking this seriously."

The thing about film is it is a very precise form. You know if you have it and you know if you don't have it. There's not really a middle bit where you're like, "I think we kind of have that scene."

Filmmaking in general is just really where I'm putting all of my energy.

I am concerned that the subtlety is being lost and every film tends to look very contrasty and saturated.

Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.

I love films-they are like paintings.

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute.

I don’t feel that I’m making movies for iPhones. If someone wants to watch it on an iPhone, I’m not going to stop them, especially if they’re paying for it, but I don’t recommend it. I think it’s dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they’re not visible. I’m trying to make an epic.

If I can play a scene in a master shot, I always prefer it. And the actors always prefer it. It's fun to look at on the screen, the actors get a chance to sink their teeth into something substantial, and it's economically helpful.

I always find film-making a pleasurable experience.

I think I'll try to keep working in film for a little bit. There's something still kind of magical about it, that I don't want to let go of.

I feel that so many sci-fi films and films in general have just become really dependent on and addicted to CGI, and that some of the big CGI films of the summer, you see these effects that look like crap. You don't know if you're watching a cartoon or something that's real. And I didn't want to fall into that trap. I really thought there was a way to use a lot of these old techniques to do some new and really neat stuff.

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn't study at film school or any of those things. I didn't bother with film theory.

. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.