Natasha Tsakos Quotes

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

I always say I make pictures rather than take pictures.

I think when I'm drawing, I'm seeing what's happening on the page almost as if it were unfolding like a movie in my head.

The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

In any great art, you create a world, and you invite people into that world, and hopefully, it's fleshed out enough and you've explained it well enough.

I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.

Our brains have this habit of quilting dreams from the fabrics of our lives. As a filmmaker, I get to do it for a living.

The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.

I became passionate about filmmaking. The thrill to make something out of nothing and to go out there to see whether it will work or not attracted me.

Movies are movement. A comic-book is immobility. From one still picture to another, but no movement. You need to make the movement in your head. In the movies, you see the movement. It's different. What is the same is the mind of the creator.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

Music runs through everything I do - I even think musically; even when I was acting, but, especially, when I am directing. Directing is very musical.

Every movie has its uniqueness. You just do your best and go with it.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

With directing, you've got to find something and drag it up from its inception, and I'm at the early stages of doing that again. There's something all-consuming and addictive about that.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.