Jeff Vandermeer Quotes

I think there's a connection with 'Nightcrawler' and 'Blowup' and other films where visual imagery is integral to the story. It allows you to play with images.

I love moments in film where there's no dialogue, and somebody communicates something with a look that kills you. That's why I love going to the cinema.

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.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.

If cinema is a woman then certainly there are many shores.

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it's very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music. Most people's eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they'll understand the music.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.

After art college, I got a job as a medical illustrator, and I was pretty good. I had to imagine what was going on in the operations because the photographs just showed a mess.

I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.

The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.

Pictures bring you inside, whether you see yourself driving a new car or as a hapless prisoner who is being abused.

If you have something to say, a movie is a really great medium to say it. It doesn't matter what the message is.

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.

Language, I think, has nothing to do with film-making. It is how you make your point and whether you exploit the visual medium maintaining a certain standard that does the trick.

You don't get to hand footnotes to the audience or explain what you were trying to do and what it's supposed to be. Everything has to be on the screen, and it has to be clear.

I found in making and directing films that the less you have voiceover, the better it is.