David Hare Quotes

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

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.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.

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

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.

It's kind of the filmmaker's job to use visual, cinematic language in a way possible to tell a story that reaches and touches as many people as possible.

I try and let the film do the talking.

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.

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.

I'm very interested in cinema that explores emotional journeys and where you can use everything at your disposal cinematically to locate you inside someone's head and their emotional landscape.

I believe the most interesting thing to look at in the world is the human face, so that is why I tend to be a little closer to human faces than maybe other directors will be.

I'm a visual filmmaker so the camera is a big part of my storytelling tool and it's something that I really rely on to tell a scene or create the suspense that I need and create the emotion of a scene or a sequence.

My movies more often are told through pictures, not words. But in this case, the pictures took second position to the incredible words of Abraham Lincoln and his presence [...] I was less interested in an outpouring of imagery than in letting the most human moment of this story evolve before us.

You usually get one or the other, you get someone who knows how to tell a story but they don't necessarily know about light and camera and rhythm, or you get someone who can make beautiful images but they can't necessarily tell a great story. He does both and I think he's going to be one of the film-makers that our time is remembered for.

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.

That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.

I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else.

When I meet certain filmmakers, sometimes you sit down and you do have some kind of shorthand. It can be fun to see them as someone who has been through similar experiences, but also as someone who just loves film. You can talk with them about films in a way that feels really free.

It's good filmmaking when you don't have to say anything and you can still tell the story.

I like telling the story in a visual way. I don't like explaining a lot in dialogue.

I mean, we should only be talking about the merits of film ["Moonlight"] because one of the great things about the visual language is that it is the great equalizer.

Photography is all about secrets... The secrets we all have and will never tell.

I'm trying to use the camera to get into people's heads. I use camera techniques a lot to articulate character.

One's ability to communicate a story visually, honestly, is a bridge of communication that transcends language because the true mark of a good film is that you can turn the sound off and watch it and have some understanding of what you're seeing.