Sarah Gavron Quotes

In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

When you're doing a character, you want to know the full landscape. You want to know them spiritually, mentally and physically.

I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

I love the grandiosity, how sweepingly entertaining films can be. And I think there's a place for films that pry more into the human condition.

Bond doesn't have an inner life. There would be moments when I'd think, 'We need to gather our thoughts here and have a breather,' where in another novel you'd slow the pace, have some description and see what Bond feels about this. But Bond doesn't reflect. All you can do is move on to the next bomb or shark or car.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.

Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.

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

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

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

Representation is actually when the character doesn't have lines, but the camera is lingering on them in their thoughts after something happened, and then we get to see them walk to their car. You really need to follow a character in order to understand what they're going through.

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

I like to shoot feature films because it's about capturing emotions... words like guilt, hurt, betrayal.

When I shoot a film, I take my camera and put it among the characters and let it show you their world, their problems, their happiness and the little things that matter to them.

I had a love for photography, which of course rolled into cinematography.

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

I want to be the person who eventually doesn't have to be in front of the camera. I can be behind the camera and really change things cinematically, and this is giving me an opportunity to do something behind the camera, which I really want to maximize.

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

I'm more into kind of real stories, psychological movies.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.