Emmanuel Lubezki Quotes

I'm not a purist - I like films that are narrated and films that aren't, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly, I just like a good story and good characters.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

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.

You don't put your personal viewpoints in a good movie. A movie should only be concerned with characters, not some big moral, although it's always underneath.

Filmmaking, whatever the window dressing or the scale of a film may be, is eventually about telling a story.

I'm really calculating when it comes to these scripts - I'm really calculated about character behavior and dialogue.

I try to write cinematically. Let me define what I mean by that. First of all, I try to write in a visual way so that the reader can watch a movie in their head. And it keeps moving. I try to structure the stories like a screenplay may be structured.

I think very cinematically.

For me, storytelling is the most interesting part of movie making.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

A good script makes our job a lot easier.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

The storytelling in a movie is in the cut; it's in the edit. It's not an actor's job, really. Your job is such a tiny little thing, and I love the feeling of juggling or tightrope walking.

Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

Film is just a great medium to express yourself and a great environment to work around.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now.

I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

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.

When I write a screenplay - and I think this is true for a lot of people - you direct the movie. That's what writing a screenplay is.

The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.

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.