Rob Marshall Quotes

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.

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.

People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.

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

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

Directing action scenes is really just pure visual storytelling that just makes sense to me pretty intuitively.

As the director of a film, as the story teller, you have to keep your voice alive.

Usually, I'll drop twenty to forty per cent of the dialogue - you can do so much with gesture. I'm still waiting to do a silent film.

I'm very heavily involved in the editorial post-production process, and the camera - it's just such a big part of my storytelling language. I like creating the tension; I like creating the emotion through the movement of my camera, or the lack of movement through my camera, depending on what fits the scene best.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

It's our responsibility as filmmakers to tell a story that's a human drama.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

Shooting a fight is like shooting any other scene. You have to tell a story using a very specific choreography.

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

There's an idea that action movies are more attractive to one gender than the other or different kinds of people or whatever. The truth is action is not any different than any other part of a story.

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.

As a cinematographer or director, I'm always looking for projects that are able to say a lot with the actor's expressions.

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

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

Visually, I want to try everything. But I believe that every shot of my films really expresses what I think about the story and the character. The most important thing is the story, not the images.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

You have to think about space differently; you have to think about time differently when you're talking about a graphic novel versus a movie.

A film should always at least be about something.

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.