John Hench Quotes

I love working with directors who have good taste. It's incredible when a director can say something and things open up for you. I went to The University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and some of my best experiences on sets have been working with other alums.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.

A good picture book should have events that are visually arresting - the pictures should call attention to what is happening in the story.

We work very hard in all of the Pixar films to not make anything in the imagery that causes people to think of something other than the story.

It's far better to shoot a good picture than a good-looking picture.

I love being able to tell a story visually. It's something I love about making commercials, where you put a magnifying glass over the mundane and make it feel extraordinary.

Connection is what one is after in probably most media, but certainly in film, which is an immersive medium.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

I work on stories rather than individual pictures.

There has to be the right pacing of images to tell the story. I'm always stunned at how little you can put in.

A short film is just another storytelling medium like TV, Features, and Webisodes. I am just thrilled that 'Silent Cargo' is getting out there for people to see.

Films should have the capacity to bring you into another world.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.

It's kind of the filmmaker's job to use visual, cinematic language in a way possible to tell a story that reaches and touches as many people as possible.

What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true.

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.

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.

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.

That's the beauty of short films; their strength lies in delivering a message creatively and simply.

The best cartoons have no words at all - just the image pops out.

I've often been asked why my shot-taking is not stylish, why I don't think about visual statements. The truth is, style is irrelevant. I never think of the shot as much as I think of the characters and what they are saying and doing.

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.