Genndy Tartakovsky Quotes

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

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

We're really interested in more visual storytelling, figuring out a way to blend our level of observation with a bigger visual scope.

A close-up on screen can say all a song can.

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point.

I've been obsessed with this kind of visual storytelling for quite a while, and I try to create material that allows me to explore it.

I made several short films with very little dialogue. I'm still not a fan of talking heads. My stories are told with images as much as possible.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

I've never made a film using dialogue or speech.

Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.

We do not need a text-based cinema... we need an image-based 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.

I didn't quite realise until we started to put together our first cut of 'Wonderstruck' how much time is spent with no words spoken whatsoever.

As a cinematographer, I was always attracted to stories that have the potential to be told with as few words as possible.

The visual architecture of 'Biutiful' is the most sophisticated of all the films I have directed.

I trust the pictures to tell what I want to say.

I do all my speeches in pictures. If I wrote words, I'd get locked in on them.

I feel like I can communicate much better using images than words.

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

Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.

Actually, I met a lot of directors and most of them have that fantasy to make a silent movie because for directors it's the purest way to tell a story. It's about creating images that tell a story and you don't need dialogue for that.

I realised that there's a more muscular approach to film-making that I found very inspiring.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.

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.