Len Wiseman Quotes

My father's films are often very slow for the modern audiences, which are used to a lot of editing. It's the audience that watches the film instead of the director dictating the reaction he wants from you.

Tracking action without cutting is the least jarring method of placing the audience into a real-time experience where they are the ones making the subtle choices of where and when to look.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.

We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.

I get people saying, 'Opera is too large a canvas for me. I don't love it. I love movies that feel almost like documentaries,' in terms of artistic vocabularies of storytelling. I totally get that discussion; that makes sense to me.

You know, things that might work in a book just do not work in the visual medium of movies.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

I was swept by the narrative structure of film... you can create a world, you can destroy it, you can do what you want with it and serve it to people just the way you like.

When you make a film, you realize that the audience will be powerless to stop it or flip back to refresh their memories or skip the boring parts. They are at the mercy of your storytelling.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

It could be sci-fi, love story, historical drama what counts for me is the fact that they're made by great directors with a great point of view who bring the audience to be elevated and at the same time entertained. That's what cinema is.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

RGV, as a filmmaker, is very smart.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

In TV the main purpose is to have them keep their hands off the dial. In movies, where you have a captive audience, the opening is intrinsic to the film.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn't done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can't just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.

For me, film is an extremely powerful way of conveying a message to a mainstream audience.

That's what I wanted to do... I wanted to make a great film that just happened to be based on a video game.

Film is probably the medium best suited to reach the most people - the visual, the aural, the limbic, the intellectual: it captures all these parts of our mind and soul. No other art form comes close.