Jonathan Glazer Quotes

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

I do all my speeches in pictures. If I wrote words, I'd get locked in on them.

I feel like I can communicate much better using images than words.

For each movie that I do, I like to find a specific language to tell the specific story.

For me, I'm not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it's easier and better to express a story through visuals.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

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 trust the pictures to tell what I want to say.

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

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

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.

The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it's very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music. Most people's eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they'll understand the music.

Pictures are so good at giving people information that they're not looking for.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It's not like having a conversation.

Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that.

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.

The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.

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

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.

'Up the Junction' really made me understand the power of cinema to create a vivid sense of a community. When I went on to make 'Bhaji on the Beach,' it was this sense I tried to recreate.