Tobe Hooper Quotes

I always find with dramas that the more that's left to the imagination of the audience, the better.

Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It's always the unspoken word and what's happening behind someone's eyes that makes it so rich.

I like movies where you feel like you're going into another world, and no matter how many times you watch it, you're gonna see something new in that world. That level of detail really inspires me.

A lot of people tend to chew up the scenery. I'm a firm believer in less is more, especially on the big screen.

I don't really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don't, it's like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line.

There's always so much more that can be conveyed on screen visually in the expressions of people's faces, in their bodies, in their body language. And also with sound design, with music.

I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.

There is a tendency to underestimate the power of what we can do without words. Sometimes you can make a scene even more powerful and precise without dialogue.

I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

I think the violence in 'The Hills Have Eyes' and 'High Tension' is much more traumatic than 'Piranha.'

The difference between a top-flight creative man and the hack is his ability to express powerful meanings indirectly.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

I was watching the Danish version of 'The Killing' when I got the audition for 'The Fall,' and I loved it; it was so original. I approached 'The Fall' with that in mind. I'd no problem with the violence - it was very clear from the script how horrifying the crimes were and that had to be shown, without going to extremes.

That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.

I like photographs which leave something to the imagination.

As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.

If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself.

When Scorsese shoots a violent scene, it's very uncomfortable - it's not like watching 'Rambo.'

I have an obligation as a writer to tell a story as interestingly as possible, but with integrity and not inserting false drama... I'm looking to be subtle, but being a wordsmith does not interest me - I want to communicate.

As much as movies are about the words that you're saying, they're also about what's not said, the silent moments.

The greatest acting really is spoken without words, or at least I like to think that.

With CG, I can do more and be sillier. In 'Diary,' there's a scene where they hit a guy with acid, and the camera is never off him, and you see it gradually eat through his skull and get all the way through his brain. That's fun, too.

Doing film and television demands a kind of simplicity. If you think something differently, the camera will pick it up.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.