Peter Gould Quotes

The less lines, the better. I am the silent film actor, but not in a slapstick sort of way. Film is an image-based medium, so whatever you can say without the words is far more provocative and punctuating. If the lines are not funny or if they don't advance the story, sometimes it's hard. I hate talk in movies.

I discovered that silent film is almost an advantage. You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines pollute it. It doesn't take much - a gaze, an eyelash flutter - for the emotion to be vivid.

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.

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've never made a film using dialogue or speech.

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.

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

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.

When you see a silent movie, you understand everything that's going on from the images because the images are so strong.

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.

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 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.

Writers would hate me saying this, and I love words, but I have to say that cinema exists, on one level, for the power of the big image and what that image does.

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.

'Khamoshi' gave me the chance to prove that expressions can also say what dialogue could.

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute.

There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.

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

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

I'm going to make a film where not one word is really important. I'm going to make it all action.