Serge Daney Quotes

The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema

Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, 'Clint, you must remember, it's only a movie.'

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

For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

We were asked to believe that the variety and the novelty of even the crude films of the early days would provide a means of entertainment which would cut out the stage.

I like watching films that can play in any language because they're essentially silent.

I love silent films. The future is unwritten.

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

The first Westerns I saw as a child were those little 8-mm. home movies put out by Castle Films.

That is - the use of the subjective camera is an idea that's been around in movies for a long, long time. And it's an idea that was seized on very notably by Sam Fuller and by Alfred Hitchcock in two different very kind of - otherwise very different styles of filmmaking.

I've storyboarded for things other people have shot. So thinking in shots and orchestrating shots is not foreign to me at all.

Movies used to be called the 'flicks' because they flickered badly: because 16 or 18 frames a second - which was those hand cranked movies on a single-bladed shutter - was really badly flickering.

My father, who was a good deal older than my mother, had basically grown up with silent films; sound didn't arrive until he was 30 years old. So he took me to see silent pictures at MoMA when I was 5 or 6 years old.

With silent films, you're better off avoiding irony, because the spectator is your accomplice. It's this pact that leads to emotion being created.

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.

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.

When I was a little boy, there was no sound in the movies.

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.

I went from silent films to watching French new wave cinema. I became entrapped by it all. That's when I knew I wanted to do film. The moment you start looking at film from a critique point of view - there's a difference between watching a film as an audience and with a critical point of view.

Film gives us the luxury of deciding where the viewpoint of the audience is, and by knowing that, we can very effectively design around what is actually seen on camera.

I don't cover my scenes. We approach it visually. Sometimes we go out of our way to do awkward blocking so that we can tell whatever the emotional heartbeat is of that scene in the most interesting way possible.

I really enjoy blocking and staging. I think most of visual storytelling is camera placement and how to stage action around the camera.

Professional cinema image-taking should integrate, serve, interest, and enhance the story. I judge cinematography not just for a story well told but for what the story is.

We build camera rigs tailored specifically to the story we're trying to tell or the shot we're trying to capture.

I love the way the long scenes feel - one of the characteristics of '70s filmmaking is that you don't cut around a lot; you let things play out. I did that on 'Samurai Jack,' and it carried over into 'Clone Wars.'