Mads Mikkelsen Quotes

In a film we have limited time and space to say what we have to, hence the visual language and brevity needs to be paramount. In a novel, however, we can dissect each thought and emotion and build on it.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

I began to learn about the camera and the actors. That gave me a lot of the skills. At the same time, advertising gives you a lot of vices, for example, an obsession for a superficial look, but at the same time, it gives you the capacity to synthesize the story - tell a story in one minute.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

What I keep searching for in movies, more and more, is the right gravity.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

In a film, you have to externalize things that are internal and of course it becomes a debate about to what extent you do that.

But Sergio Leone invented totally the way of, you know, the details, the eyes, the hands - fantastic.

Film is the only language I speak, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don't want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities.

When you're playing a real person, there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

Making a film, it uses a certain... 'pretend-muscle,' I don't know what you want to call it. It exhausts something in me, I find. It has to be really something to get me interested.

I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

I thought Mia Hansen-Love was a true auteur, and I always wanted to work with her. Mia's empathy for her characters and her ability to use the language of cinema to communicate real human depth is extraordinary. She's a humanist.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

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

Filmmaking, whatever the window dressing or the scale of a film may be, is eventually about telling a story.