Laurie R. King Quotes

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

I watched a lot of silent movies. It's a very specific way of writing, which is more of a challenge than the directing. You have to describe images. It's easier to shoot them.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

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

I'm not a purist - I like films that are narrated and films that aren't, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly, I just like a good story and good characters.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

I love some films with very silent characters, people who don't speak, but I wouldn't be able to do that.

Part of what's so tricky in a film that's two hours long is how many themes can you effectively explore.

I'm always really impressed when a movie can function like a novel does - that's so hard to do.

In a silent film, you speak but the audience does not hear you.

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.

I watched season four of 'The Wire.' They have subtle performances that they do through their eyes. You could watch season four with the audio off and still understand what's happening through their eyes.

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.'

Breathing is always key in any character. When you have a character with no voice, that makes it even more important.

Modeling is really silent acting.

I've always been better at informing the audience through images than through words, but I took on a script that was so dialogue-intensive, that the words had to do all the informing.

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.

I love scenes with minimal dialogue.

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

I made several short films with very little dialogue. I'm still not a fan of talking heads. My stories are told with images as much as possible.

Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.

When you see a silent movie, you understand everything that's going on from the images because the images are so strong.

I like some of the early silent films because I love to watch how actors had to play then. What would interest me today is to do a silent film.