Asif Kapadia Quotes

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 love scenes with minimal dialogue.

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

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.

For me, I'm not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it's easier and better to express a story through visuals.

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.

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.

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?'

Well, visual language is another boring discussion about the nature of film.

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

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.

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

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

Image is an international language.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

Right before 'American Dreams,' I started to pursue these avenues, like short films and getting into a couple night courses to really study photography and cinematography, and the language of visual storytelling.

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.

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.

One picture is worth a thousand words.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.