George C. Wolfe Quotes

Movies alone have the hideous capacity to do everything for you. So in directing movies, you have to figure how to leave things out - because when you leave things out, you evoke the imaginative participation of the audience.

I love making movies, I love trying to make them as good as I can, but I feel like sometimes the marketing and publicity around the movie, becomes the most important part of it.

Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life-and-death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems.

In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.

I've always felt that music is more expressive than dialogue. I've always said that my best dialogue and screenwriter is Ennio Morricone. Because, many times, it is more important a note or an orchestration than a line said.

I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

The music is an important and crucial part to an animated film. You don't think about it, but you can watch Tom and Jerry with no words, for hours, and the music dictates the emotion and where the story is going and how you're supposed to feel. Everything is in the music.

If comics need to be deconstructed and explained, something is really wrong with them.

In a live environment, the more bodies you put in a room, the more energy there will be. That's a real big payoff. That's really important, the live show, it's a big cycle of energy. If the audience is boring, it's tough to get excited about it.

If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

It's always important to understand as filmmakers that we're not making a documentary and it has to look good. It has to entertain, because otherwise your audience will switch and watch another series. It has to look better and larger than life.

In terms of trying to improve as an actor, for me it's always important to return to the stage. After doing a piece of theater for a prolonged period, I can think I must have surely improved in some way as an actor - you must be fitter than you were prior to doing it. For me, theater is very, very important in keeping things fresh and dangerous.

What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don't get impatient in the theatre.

Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat, like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience.

I just want to make a beautiful film. I've had it in my head for so long, so I want to try. Every now and again I get scared. And that's not really how I operate in songwriting or as Sia the artist, the singer. I don't operate from a place of fear. But this is such a new area for me. I still have some insecurity. So, like, once a week I get washed from the top of my skull down to my toes with this vomitous feeling of fear. I think, "Just don't do it. You don't have to do it. You're already a singer and a songwriter. Really, you don't have to make a movie.".

I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.

I always wanted to do a movie, because I love the movies. They give you a chance to have an intimacy with your audience that is different from stand up. With movies, you can bring the audience in with a close up, and emote in a different way.

The ones that work out really and ones that become something to the audience, those are the most important people.

You can never predict what an audience is going to respond to and what they're going to watch. What we always knew was that we were making something that we were proud of and that we thought was important, and we hoped that people would feel the same way.

I want as many people to see the show [Hamilton] in its musical theater form as possible before it's translated, and whether it's a good act of translation or a bad act of translation, it's a leap, and very few stage shows manage the leap successfully.

That's the most important thing for me in TV, telling the story to as many people as we can.

I like to bring my audience on a journey during my 90 minute concert. I will tell stories every few songs about the creation of a tune etc. and it gives the listener a glimpse inside my songs and then as you get to the last half hour you pick up the pace and work harder and get more into the show. It's all about stagecraft.

I'm probably harder on myself than I need to be, but it's important to me if I'm going to ask an audience for an hour of their time that I don't waste their time. I want to give them something significant to chew on.

If it's done right, radio can just be far more important than television.

The art of movies is to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief. They need to use their imaginations.