Andy Serkis Quotes

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.

It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying.

For me, the perfect film has no dialogue at all. It's purely a visual, emotional, visceral kind of experience. And I think one can create wonderful depth and meaning and communication without using words. I started out as an illustrator and a cartoonist and caricature artist, so for me the visual is primary.

Film is anti-language.

I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.

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

One of my favorite things to do is not to speak on screen. In theater it's different because there's a lot of emphasis on language - it's a different medium. But that is one of the most wonderful things about film. A person's face can say so much more than their voice can.

There are things I want to say: They are very important to me, and, not being a writer, I do it through movies.

Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.

It's a good challenge as an actor to express feelings without saying too many words.

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.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

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

The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.

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

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.

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.

When you are modelling, you are creating a picture, a still life, perhaps something like a silent film. You convey emotion but you are only using your body.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

The body says what words cannot.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

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.

Nonverbal communication forms a social language that is in many ways richer and more fundamental than our words.

I don't need dialogue to convey emotion or thoughts to my audience.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'